Colluding with the Tories is politically toxic

The right-wing of the Labour Party have been relentlessly pushing the narrative that Jeremy Corbyn is incapable of winning the 2020 General Election because he doesn't appeal to Tory voters, with the implicit assumption being that appealing to Tory voters is the only possible way to win a General Election.

In this article I'm going to criticise this ludicrous fairy story as the arrant nonsense that it is.

Ed Miliband's strategy

The first thing to note about this idea that Labour must appeal to Tory voters in order to win a General Election, is that this was precisely the strategy cooked up by Ed Miliband and Ed Balls as Labour's 2015 General Election campaign.

Instead of presenting themselves as a genuine alternative to the Tories and their socially and economically destructive ideological austerity agenda, the Labour leadership somehow decided to run an appallingly uninspiring "austerity-lite" campaign, that could have easily had the strapline "Vote for us because we're not quite as evil as the Tories".

Instead of deciding to point out that austerity is an obvious con designed to ensure the upwards redistribution of wealth, and presenting the absolute mountain of evidence that George Osborne missed all of his 2010 economic projections by miles - Labour decided to agree with the ludicrous Tory stance that "There Is No Alternative" to austerity.

Instead of attacking the Tories and their disastrous austerity con, the Labour leadership tried to agree the Tories into submission in a pathetic and utterly futile attempt to appeal to Tory voters.

The problem for the Blairites who keep shouting that Labour needs to veer rightwards is that in 2015 their austerity-lite strategy backfired terribly. The concept of selling exactly the same toxic economic snake oil as the Tories - but just in slightly smaller doses, was never going to inspire anyone other than people so blinded by Labour Party political tribalism that they'd been rendered utterly incapable of questioning the party line or recognising even the most strategically inept drivel for what it is.

Labour's decision to offer the same right-wing economic snake oil as the Tories and Lib-Dems had been pushing for the previous five years left the English electorate with the appalling choice between, ideological austerity, austerity enablers, or austerity-lite, which is no choice at all. Is it any wonder that five million people voted for UKIP and the Greens and 34% of the electorate didn't even bother to vote at all?

For every Tory voter won over by Labour's inept austerity-lite campaign, it's likely that numerous potential Labour voters were driven away, either to protest vote for other parties, outright non-participation or even "if Labour are offering austerity-lite then I might as well just vote for the real thing" .

Tory voters

The Tories won a majority government with the backing of just 24% of the eligible electorate. Of course a small proportion of this 24% voted in their own selfish self-interest (knowing that the Tories would continue lavishing the wealthy minority with tax cuts while loading the burden of austerity onto the poor, the young and the disabled), however many others voted against their own self-interest out of ignorance (the Question Time woman who voted Tory and then cried when they broke their election promise not to slash her Tax Credits for example).

There's actually very little chance of Labour convincing people who are so badly informed that they believe Tory election lies, rote learn their political opinions from the mainstream media and continue believing in ludicrous economic fairytales like the austerity narrative despite so much evidence that it's a con.

As Mark Twain once said, "It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled". People don't want to accept that austerity is an obvious con because that would entail accepting that they've been taken for complete idiots for the last six years.

Lib-Dem voters

Between 2010 and 2015 the Lib-Dem share of the vote collapsed from 6.8 million (22%) to just 2.6 million (8%) largely as a result of their collusion with the Tories.

Nobody could claim that this mass abandonment of the Lib-Dems was a surprise to the Labour leadership because the polls showed a rapid decline in support for the Lib-Dems immediately after their deal to prop up David Cameron's government, and them consistently hovering at around 10% or below from December 2010 all the way up to the 2015 General election. 

It was beyond doubt that some three and a half million Lib-Dem voters (12% of the voting public) had abandoned the party, but the Labour leadership did virtually nothing to court betrayed Lib-Dem voters, preferring instead to attempt the futile task of pinching voters from the Tories directly with their austerity-lite nonsense, thus ensuring that people who abandoned the Lib-Dems for their collusion with the Tories had no reason to consider voting Labour.

When millions of people have abandoned one of your rival parties because of their collusion with the Tories, it takes a special degree of strategic ineptitude to decide to run an election campaign based on making your economic narrative almost indistinguishable from that of the Tories.

The SNP

The SNP annihilated the Westminster parties at the 2015 General Election because they presented a genuine alternative to Tory austerity. It would be ludicrous to deny the role of nationalist sentiments in the most stunning electoral surge in British history, but it would also be ludicrous to fail to recognise that Nicola Sturgeon's consistent anti-Tory, anti-austerity narrative helped to hoover up hundreds of thousands of dissatisfied Scottish Labour voters too.

Had the Labour Party presented an anti-austerity agenda instead of a pro-austerity ("we're not quite as evil as the Tories") one, it seems likely that their annihilation in Scotland might not have been quite so complete.

Labour membership

The massive surge in the number of Labour Party members since Jeremy Corbyn burst onto the scene is a very clear indicator that there is a strong latent desire for a change of direction away from the neoliberal crony capitalist agenda that has completely dominated Westminster politics since 1979 and the Labour Party since 1994.

The Labour Party now has more members than it has had in decades, but the Blairites would have us believe that tens of thousands of people flocking back to the Labour Party is some kind of disaster, and that what the party needs is to go back to alienating ordinary people by aping Tory economic policy and desperately sucking up to multinational corporations and the right-wing press barons who frame the political debate.

Is it really that outrageous to suggest that Labour have a better chance of success by trying to offer policies that their core supporters actually like and will campaign enthusiastically about, rather than by trying to imitate the Tories in order to seek approval from right-wing press barons like Rupert Murdoch and Jonathan Harmsworth?

Policies

The Blairites are absolutely desperate to rubbish Jeremy Corbyn's left-wing policies, like investment in education and infrastructure, renationalisation of core infrastructure and services (like the railways, energy companies, NHS, education system and Royal mail) ceaselessly describing such policies as "unelectable", yet what they don't bother to mention is that the policy of renationalisation of core services is overwhelmingly popular with the general public, and not just traditional Labour voters.

Non-voters

By far the biggest target demographic for the Labour Party should be non-voters. Is it really that crazy an idea that the Labour Party should try to offer a bold alternative to the pro-corporate neoliberal consensus that has dominated Westminster politics since 1979 in order to attract people who were turned away from voting entirely after it became completely clear that no Labour were offering the same brand of right-wing economic dogma as the Tories?
The Scottish independence referendum was absolute proof that people will turn out to vote if they think it will actually make a difference, so perhaps it would be a good idea for Labour to explain how they would make a difference, rather than imitating the Tories in another futile effort to pinch a few of their voters (at the expense of alienating millions of potential Labour voters who would like to see an alternative to Tory ideological dogma, not a reiteration of it).

Conclusion

The Blairite fantasy that Labour has to shift even further to the right in order to become "electable" is completely unrealistic. It doesn't matter how many biased focus groups or blatantly rigged push polls they produce in order to manufacture the case that the public want Labour to imitate the Tories, the facts speak for themselves. Ed Miliband tried the strategy of imitating the Tories and failed abjectly. What the Blairites are calling for is yet another attempt at the failed experiment that lost them the 2015 General Election, and ended up alienating the Scottish electorate so badly that Scottish labour are now even less popular than the Scottish Tories!

The behaviour of the Blairites who would rather wreck their own party and hand power to the Tories than get behind Jeremy Corbyn is extremely destructive, and also reminiscent of Einstein's definition of insanity (trying the same thing over and again and expecting different results).

 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

How the mainstream media frames the political debate

The mainstream media frames the parameters of political debate. For decades the fanatically right-wing Thatcherite economic dogma (privatisation, tax cuts for the rich, repression of dissent, deregulated financial markets, repression of wages, centralisation of political power, neglect of manufacturing and industry ...) has been treated by the mainstream press as "moderate" and pretty much unquestionable. While anyone who tries to question the ludicrous assumptions that underpin right-wing economic dogma is treated as "extremist", "militant" or even "insane". 

Austerity

Austerity is a classic example of how the mainstream press can convince millions of people into believing in absolute drivel.

After the insanity of financial market deregulation resulted in the 2007-08 financial sector insolvency crisis, the mainstream press simply helped the Conservatives to re-brand the causes of the crisis (three decades of right-wing crony capitalist economic dogma) as the cure for the crisis with the endlessly repeated austerity narrative (more right-wing crony capitalist economic dogma).

The austerity narrative is such an obvious con that it seems remarkable that so many people still buy into it, yet if they live in a political environment where the validity of ideological austerity is treated as an unquestionable underlying truth.

The few voices pointing out that it is an obvious con-job must end up sounding like fringe-element crackpots, rather than people who actually understand what's going on and are trying to break the collective delusion. The tide of public opinion seems to be slowly slowly turning against austerity, but it's still incredible that so many people buy into such an obvious deception, and that it's taken six years of it for public perceptions to begin to slowly change.

The Internet

Over the last decade or so the Internet has been slowly challenging the dominance of the corporate press. The circulation figures of pretty much all newspapers have been in spectacular decline for the last decade, but the decline in sales for the right-wing tabloids has been particularly dramatic. Rupert Murdoch's most widely read propaganda sheet The S*n has lost over 1.25 million daily sales since 2010. The Daily Mail has lost over 500,000 sales in the same period, and other right-wing papers like the Daily Star (300,000) Daily Express (250,000) and Daily Telegraph (200,000) have all experienced significant declines in sales.

Of course the mainstream media has established a strong position on the Internet, with Daily Mail Online and The Guardian (which continues its inexorable shift towards right-wing orthodoxy) being two of the most visited news websites in the English speaking world, but the Internet has also opened up the door to people with heterodox views who would never have been allowed to write for the mainstream press in previous generations.

This blog is an example. Before the Internet existed the idea of someone like me (who has never been on the television, or even interviewed in his local newspaper) reaching a daily audience of tens of thousands of people would have been unthinkable. Then there are plenty of other alternative voices out there too. The Canary provides a valuable platform to a whole host of writers who would likely never have been given a platform to express their heterodox views by the mainstream press. There are online platforms that are much more likely to allow contributions from non-conformist writers who dare to question the right-wing orthodoxy such as Huffington Post and The Conversation UK. Then there are a load of properly independent blogs too like The Void, Pride's Purge, Vox Political, Wings Over Scotland and Political Scrapbook.

One problem is that not everyone has the Internet. A lot of older people haven't really engaged with the Internet, or with social media (where awareness of most of the heterodox websites arises), so an awful lot of older people still exist in a carefully managed news environment where their political awareness is drip-fed to them by the newspapers, the television and radio stations. The British newspapers are the most right-wing in Europe, while the corporate dominance of television and the radio is only marginally offset by the BBC, because the state broadcaster is always heavily biased in favour of the government of the day as a result of their finances being dictated by the ruling political party.

Demographics

Another problem is that the older people are, the more likely they are to vote in elections, and the more likely they are to vote for political parties that push radically right-wing economic policies.

In the 2015 General Election there was an absolutely clear pattern. The younger people are, the less likely they were to vote Tory. In fact, on average Labour marginally outperformed The Tories in the 18-50 demographic, but they were cancelled out by the fact that the 50-59 demographic voted in favour of the Tories over Labour by +4 percentage points, and the over 60 demographic voted in favour of the Tories over Labour by an incredible +20 percentage points.

Pensioners and the wealthy (usually older generations) are two of the key Tory demographics, so they have been protected from carrying the burden of ideological austerity. Pensioners are also the least likely to have access to online information sources, meaning they're by far the most likely to buy into right-wing propaganda narratives (like the austerity con) that are treated as unquestionable assumptions by the vast majority of the mainstream press.

Under these circumstances it's no surprise at all that the older generations choose to vote Tory. The problem is that the younger generations who have undeniably been penalised at every turn by the Tories are far less likely to vote, meaning that they end up suffering even more, because in party political democracy there's hardly a more effective way of ensuring that the ruling party don't serve your generation's interests than by not bothering to vote.

Conclusion

The conclusion is quite dispiriting. British democracy is obviously a shambles when the least informed demographics (who source all of their political information from the television and the mainstream press) are by far the most likely to vote, while the generations that are much more likely to have access to alternative sources of political information are the least likely to vote.

The only glimmer of hope is that the younger generations get over their apathy (or their entirely indistinguishable Russell Brandian belligerence) and actually begin voting against the purveyors of ideological austerity who attack their generation in order to protect the interests of the generations that do bother to vote.

If poor people and the younger generations don't bother to vote, then they can hardly be surprised if they end up with a ruling party that enacts policies that favour the super-rich and older generations, whilst loading the burden of ideological austerity onto the poor, the young and minority groups like the disabled.

The first step is for people to realise that the majority of the UK media is owned by a bunch of radically right-wing sociopaths who are intent on presenting the kind of fanatical right-wing economic dogma that suits their own interests as "moderate" and any opposition as "extreme". The next step is for the younger generations and other victims of harsh ideological austerity to actually bother standing up for their own interests, either by voting against parties that push austerity, or better still, involving themselves in direct action.

 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

UKIP are a Tory Trojan Horse party

I first published a version of this article back in September 2014, but I've updated it to include more information about what some of these twelve Tory-UKIP defectors have been up to since then.

Nigel Farage

The UKIP party leader Nigel Farage clearly assumes the majority of people are stupid enough to fall for his jovial pint-swilling "man of the people" act. I mean how gullible would you have to be to believe that a privately educated former Tory party activist and commodities trader in the City of London is the kind of guy to stand up against the wealthy establishment in order to defend the interests of ordinary people?

perhaps it is a little unfair to judge Farage only by his establishment background, because the left-wing firebrand Tony Benn also came from an establishment background and nobody could ever accuse him of being a Tory. Of all the many many things that Farage has said and done to actually prove that he's still a Tory at heart is the way he lionises Margaret Thatcher and declares himself and UKIP to be the heirs to Thatcherism. A man can hardly declare that he is the only politician "keeping the flame of Thatcherism alive" without looking like a Tory in a purple tie.

UPDATE: In 2015 Farage decided to make an all-or-nothing gamble to try and win the Westminster seat he's always been craving. In order to try to boost his chances of success he promised to resign as UKIP leader if he failed to win the South Thanet seat he was contesting. He duly failed to win the seat and resigned, but then hastily un-resigned and in so doing proved beyond doubt that not only is he a reckless gambler, but also a man who is utterly incapable of sticking to his word too.

Stuart Wheeler

Many might imagine that Nigel Farage is the driving force behind UKIP, but he's just the charismatic front-man. The guy who is really running the show is the Eton educated UKIP party treasurer Stuart Wheeler. Wheeler made his fortune setting up the spread betting firm IG Index in the 1970s. Until 2011 he was a Tory party supporter, so much so that the £5 million donation he made to the Tories in 2001 to bankroll their General Election campaign is still the single largest political donation in British political history.

Wheeler has gone from bankrolling the Tory party to bankrolling UKIP, and he's brought a large network of other former Tory party donors with him. UKIP is bankrolled by former Tory party donors to such an extent that 90% of their donations now come from the people who used to bankroll the Tory party!

Neil Hamilton

The Tory MP for Tatton Neil Hamilton became a political joke after he was caught up in the cash for questions scandal in 1994. Despite having the fourth strongest Tory majority in the whole country Hamilton was easily defeated by the anti-corruption campaigner Martin Bell at the 1997 General Election. Subsequently Neil and his wife Christine were given numerous opportunities to keep themselves in the limelight on shows like Have I got News for You and The Weakest Link.

In 2011 Nigel Farage handed Neil Hamilton his ticket back into politics by supporting his bid to join the UKIP National Executive Committee. By 2014 Hamilton had worked his way up to deputy Chairman of the party and campaign director for the 2014 European Elections.

Back in the 1990s I found it infuriating that several TV shows allowed this guy to blatantly cash in on the corruption allegations against him, but it's even more infuriating that UKIP have welcomed him back into the world of politics with open arms.

UPDATE: After spending almost two decades seeking a route back into politics the people of Mid and West Wales handed Neil Hamilton a route back into politics by voting UKIP which gave them one seat on the regional list, top of that list was Neil Hamilton. I wonder how many of the people who voted UKIP in this region actually understood that they were endorsing Neil Hamilton?

William Legge

Eton educated William Legge (or "The 10th Earl of Dartmouth" to use his establishment title) was a Tory member of the unelected House of Lords from 1999 to 2007. In 2009 he was elected as a UKIP MEP for the South West region, which I suppose is actually better than simply being appointed to the bloated anti-democratic shambles that is the House of Lords. The point still stands that he's one of the many former Tories now wearing the purple and yellow of UKIP.

Roger Helmer

Roger Helmer is another Tory MEP to have defected to UKIP. He was originally elected a Conservative MEP in 1999, but defected to UKIP in 2012. Many people have taken offence at Helmer's bigotry (claiming that rape victims "share a part of the responsibility", comparing gay equality with bigotry and incest, claiming that homophobia is a meaningless word ...) and his climate change denialism, however I'm much more concerned about his links to a foreign right-wing corporate pressure group called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
 
ALEC is a profoundly disturbing organisation that writes corporate friendly "model legislation" which is then turned into state law by ALEC friendly legislators. Laws written by, or heavily influenced by ALEC include the classification of environmental protest activities as "terrorism", further privatisation of the US education system, deregulation of the US energy and telecommunications markets, support for the private prison-industrial complex and the appalling "stand your ground" murderers' charter.

Helmer was appointed as an Adam Smith Scholar by ALEC in 2005 and served on the ALEC International Relations Task Force. It seems extremely odd that someone with such strong links with an organisation intent on rewriting the law in the US and abroad in order to suit corporate interests, would want to join a party that endlessly harps on about protecting British sovereignty. The only way it makes any sense is if the endlessly repeated UKIP concerns about British sovereignty are just a smokescreen to obscure an extremely right-wing pro-corporate agenda.

Janice Atkinson

Janice Atkinson sprung into the public consciousness when she decided to verbally abuse some Green Party activists and was photographed making obscene gestures at them during the 2014 European election campaign. Despite this loutish behaviour she was still elected as a UKIP MEP for the South East.

Before Janice Atkinson defected to UKIP in 2011 she was a failed Tory. She was a press officer for the Tory party during their disastrous 2005 General Election campaign and in 2010 she was a failed Tory parliamentary candidate in the West Yorkshire constituency of Batley and Spen. It was the failure of politicians like Janice Atkinson to win back seats that were lost to Labour in 1997 that prevented the Tories from forming a majority government in 2010.

Even though she is clearly an obnoxious individual, it is difficult not to admire her opportunism. She was clearly failing to get anywhere within the Tory party, so she made the decision to jump ship and get herself on the gravy train of European parliamentary expenses with UKIP instead.

UPDATE: Atkinson was turfed out of UKIP in 2015 after being caught trying to inflate her European Parliament expenses. She now sits in the European Parliament as an independent MEP.

Bill Etheridge

Bill Etheridge is another of the crop of Tory party failures to have joined UKIP before the 2014 European elections. Prospective Tory party councilors Bill and his wife Star resigned from the party after having been suspended for posting pictures of themselves holding golliwog dolls on social media.

Nigel Farage was given reason to regret welcoming Etheridge into the UKIP fold when he decided to advise a UKIP youth conference that they should try to imitate the speaking style of Adolf Hitler!

Bill Etheridge is clearly a man with an appalling lack of self-awareness. After the Daily Telegraph reported his Hitler comments, he had the cheek to criticise their coverage as "tasteless" and "disgusting" as if advising the UKIP youth to strut around like a bunch of little Hitlers is perfectly acceptable.

Another indicator of his appalling lack of self-awareness is a sneering Facebook attack on the Tory party for their feeble "vote UKIP get Labour" propaganda campaign. His riposte is that "if you vote UKIP, you get UKIP". It seems that he has completely forgotten his political past, otherwise he might have said "Vote UKIP, get Tory rejects like me".

Nathan Gill

Yet another embarrassing addition to the UKIP fold as a result of the 2014 European elections is the former Tory party activist Nathan Gill. Shortly after he was elected as the UKIP MEP for Wales it was revealed that until 2008 he had run a home care company in Hull that had mainly employed Polish and Phillipino immigrants on poverty wages, many of them living in bunkhouse accommodation. Gill didn't close his immigrant reliant business because of any new found opposition to immigration, the business went bankrupt with debts of £116,000.

The appalling hypocrisy of going from an employer who pays such low wages that they are forced to rely upon dozens and dozens of immigrant workers living in bunkhouse accomodation, to standing as a candidate for an anti-immigration party is undeniable.

Aside from the fact that he seems to be a perfectly inappropriate candidate for an anti-immigration party, another question must surely be why UKIP couldn't find any better candidates in the whole of Wales than a man with no real business experience apart from driving his company into bankruptcy, despite cutting costs by exploiting cheap foreign labour?

UPDATE: In 2016 Welsh voters handed Nathan Gill a seat in the Welsh Assembly on the North Wales regional list, so now he gets to claim two salaries as a UKIP politician despite having a track record of exploiting migrant workers until his company went bankrupt!

Amjad Bashir

Amjad Bashir was yet another long-term Tory party activist turned UKIP MEP. He explained that his main reasons for joining UKIP were to remove the UK from the EU, his opposition to gay equality and his desire to dramatically cut down on immigration.

The hypocrisy and self-interest of a Pakistani born immigrant joining UKIP and making statements like "we now have to seriously restrict immigration" is appalling. He's one of the beneficiaries of immigration into the UK from the former colonies, now he wants to kick away the ladder to stop others coming and benefiting in the same way that he has.

UPDATE: Amjad Bashir was elected as a UKIP member of the European Parliament in 2014 but swiftly defected back to the Tory party in January 2015! This defection left the Yorkshire and Humber region with two MEPs each from UKIP, Labour and the Tories, which is grotesquely unrepresentative of the actual results which were UKIP 403,630, Labour 380,189, Tory 248,945. 

Douglas Carswell

Despite his propensity for expenses scamming (flipping his second home, getting the taxpayer to pay for all manner of expensive furniture and subsidise his food bills) and his climate change denialism, Charterhouse educated Douglas Carswell was a darling of the Tory party, attracting glowing praise from the Telegraph, the Spectator and the Tory blogger Guido Fawkes. Despite all of the praise, Carswell's main political achievement within the Tory party seems to have been the ridiculous campaign to politicise the police by introducing elected PCCs, a policy which resulted in the lowest electoral turnouts since universal suffrage!

In August 2014 Carswell defected to UKIP claiming that David Cameron was not doing enough to deliver change.

UPDATE: Carswell managed to keep his seat in the 2015 General Election but has flown under the radar ever since, only popping up on the odd occasion to make himself the only non-Tory MP to vote in favour of brutal Tory policies like Tax Credit cuts for the working poor and welfare cuts for disabled people.

Mark Reckless

Of all of the new crop of Tory MPs in 2010 Mark Reckless was one of the least notable. In fact, hardly anyone had even heard of him until he decided to follow Douglas Carswell's lead and defect to UKIP. His decision to announce his defection at the UKIP conference, and just a couple of days before the Tory party conference seemed premeditated to create the maximum possible publicity.

Before he defected to UKIP a few of the only notable things he did were joining five other Tories to vote against the tripling of "aspiration taxes" for university students, excusing the fact that he missed a parliamentary vote by claiming that he was too drunk and ..err ... publicly lambasting Douglas Carswell for defecting to UKIP!

UPDATE: Reckless was deposed at the 2015 General Election but quickly bounced back by sneaking onto the regional list for the South Wales East region in the 2016 Welsh Assembly election.

David Silvester

The eleven other people mentioned in this article have all defected from the Tory party and achieved important positions within UKIP (party leader, deputy chairman, MEP, party treasurer, candidate MPs ...) however it is important not to forget the dozens and dozens of Tory party councillors to have defected to UKIP too.

Until 2013 David Silvester was a Tory councillor in Henley-on-Thames, but then he decided to defect to UKIP. He hit the headlines in 2014 when he decided to blame the Somerset Floods on the introduction of gay equality legislation (in my view one of the very few decent things the Tory led government has actually done).

UKIP initially tried to defend Silvester's absurd comments by saying they were just his own personal opinion, however Nigel Farage went on to say that it was "incredibly damaging" when "defectors" from the Conservative Party join UKIP and say "appalling and outrageous things". If Farage is really so concerned about defectors from the Tory party damaging the reputation of his party, one has to wonder why he continues to allow extremists from the far-right fringe of the Tory party to flood into his party through the door that he is holding open for them?


UPDATE: After a few weeks of wrangling Silvester was eventually thrown out of UKIP February 2014. He clung on as an independent councillor until 2015 when he lost his seat. 

Conclusion

It's remarkable that so many UKIP voters fail to realise that they are just a Tory Trojan Horse party that are led by a former Tory party activist, massively bankrolled by former Tory donors and stuffed full of failed, defected and disgraced former Tory politicians.

 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 Scottish Labour collapse

The result of the Scottish Parliamentary election was a clear victory for the SNP, who will form their third consecutive government. The Scottish Green Party did very well to significantly increase their representation, including the election of the land reform campaigner Andy Wightman and Scotland's youngest ever MSP Ross Greer.

The Liberal Democrats managed to avoid even more losses, but the biggest story was the collapse in the Labour Party vote from 2011, and the significant increase in the Tory vote. Apparently the 2016 Scottish Parliament election is the first non-EU election since the 1930s in which the Tories have won more Scottish seats than Labour.

Even before the first results were announced bitter Blairite politicians like the former Dunfirmline and West Fife MP Thomas Docherty were chelping from the sidelines that Labour's catastrophic results in Scotland were all the fault of Jeremy Corbyn.

It's absolutely staggering to see someone like Thomas Docherty trying to blame Labour's Scottish Parliament collapse on Jeremy Corbyn when he knows perfectly well that the damage was done during Ed Miliband's leadership. Can he really have forgotten that he was one of the 40 Scottish Labour MPs to lose their Westminster seats during the 2015 General Election massacre? 

Can Docherty really have forgotten that this catastrophic performance (the worst collapse in British electoral history) came about as a result of Ed Miliband's strategically inept decision to push Ed Balls' ludicrous "austerity-lite" agenda in Scotland (which allowed the SNP to gleefully present themselves as the only alternative to Tory austerity). Such an inept campaign strategy would have been bad enough in isolation, but after Labour spent a couple of years publicly French-kissing the Tories during the independence debate, it was positively suicidal.

Expecting Jeremy Corbyn to be able to instantly undo damage like that would be wishful enough, but when he's lumbered with an extremely limited Scottish Labour leader like Kezia Dugdale, expecting any kind of phoenix-like Scottish Labour recovery isn't just wishful thinking, it's downright delusional.

The SNP winning a third term and the election of several more Green MSPs are definite positives from the 2016 Scottish Parliament election, but the strong performance of the Tories in Scotland really is concerning. Back in 2015 the English electorate punished the Lib-Dems for propping up David Cameron's malicious and incompetent government by ...err ... replacing most of the Lib-Dem MPs with Tory ones! This time around it's the Scottish electorate punishing Labour for the way they cosied up to the Tories during the independence referendum and parroted Tory economic policy during the 2015 General Election campaign by ... err ... allowing the Tories to overtake Labour and become the official opposition in the Scottish parliament!

Anyone who was expecting Jeremy Corbyn to somehow find a magical fix to repair the collapse in Labour support in Scotland must be delusional, but then it's pretty obvious that the bitter Blairites knew perfectly well that a miraculous recovery in Scotland would have been completely impossible, no matter who was in charge, but they simply can't resist attacking Jeremy Corbyn and trying to prescribe the centre-right Blairite snake oil that destroyed Scottish Labour as the miracle cure to save Scottish Labour.

 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

Some of the best anti-Tory #VoteConservative tweets

On May 5th 2016 the United Kingdom went to the polls to vote in various elections including the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish parliamentary elections, the London assembly elections, various local and mayoral elections, and a re-run of the farcical 2012 PCC elections.

One of the top trending hashtags on Twitter throughout the day was #VoteConservative, which seemed very dispiriting at first, until it became clear that the vast majority of people using the hashtag were doing it ironically.

The whole thing was triggered when David Cameron and various other top Tories began the PR exercise of including the hashtag '#VoteConservative in their tweets.

Sam and I just got back from voting - whatever you're doing today, make sure you #VoteConservative and #BackZac2016. pic.twitter.com/dfSW6aQnS8

— David Cameron (@David_Cameron) May 5, 2016

The Twittersphere was never going to let a hashtag like that go to waste without ridiculing it, so the #VoteConservative feed soon became completely dominated by anti-Tory tweets.

Here is a selection of some of the best examples of anti-Tory #VoteConservative Tweets:

#VoteConservative if you really do think it was poor and disabled ppl who broke the economy & should be punished accordingly

— Amy (@thisisamy_) May 5, 2016

#VoteConservative if you think Britain should bow its head to Saudi Arabia just so we can get cheap Oil. pic.twitter.com/sSSelxEAs7

— Shlomo Anker (@Hapoel4) May 5, 2016

Please #VoteConservative to alienate all those pesky junior doctors. We don't need them or the NHS, we can save our own lives.

— Moi (@Kelsblells) May 5, 2016

If you are an empty, heartless shell that's driven only by sheer greed, leech from the poor, laugh at the destitute then #VoteConservative

— Loobyloo (@joanna_caron) May 5, 2016

@David_Cameron #VoteConservative for the privatisation of schools and the NHS, so nasty Dave can line the pockets of his mates.

— James Palmer (@JamPal32) May 5, 2016

If you want to watch '1984,' but you're too cheap to buy the DVD - #VoteConservative

— The Hourly Terrier (@hourlyterrier) May 5, 2016

You could #VoteConservative or you could save yourself the trip and just kick a poor person in the face. Same thing, really.

— Rowena Wilding (@rowenawilding) May 5, 2016

#VoteConservative To support the offshore tax industry

— Martin O'Neill (@DrNostromo) May 5, 2016

#VoteConservative if you hate the poor, the disabled, the homeless, students, teachers, Muslims, junior doctors, libraries, badgers & foxes.

— Ivan White (@ivanwhite48) May 5, 2016

If you're really cold of heart
Laughing as we fall apart
Be part of this evil story
Just nip out, Vote for a Tory #VoteConservative

— Andy Hearn (@AndyHearn09) May 5, 2016

Cut for time today?

Might not make it to the polling station?

Want to #voteconservative?

Save time

Just drive over someone disabled

— YES2 removing tories (@YESthatcherDead) May 5, 2016

#VoteConservative if you agree with the systematic dismantling of the nhs, Trade unions and the demonisation of the poor, sick and disabled

— end austerity now (@socialistbelief) May 5, 2016

#VoteConservative for more bank fraud cover-ups and less regulation of banks. #HSBCfraud

— Mr Ethical (@nw_nicholas) May 5, 2016

#VoteConservative
if you support :-
election fraud
tax avoidance
NHS privatisation
taking benefits from disabled
& making people homeless

— Pauline Lane (@Antonineone1) May 5, 2016

Should you #VoteConservative? pic.twitter.com/rubbzlfNrv

— UK Uncut (@UKuncut) May 5, 2016

The fact that this highly predictable PR disaster was triggered by ex-PR man David Cameron's Tweets shows him up as the massively over-promoted and incompetent Tory toff that he is. There's no way that Twitter was simply going to sit back and allow David Cameron's one dimensional Tory propaganda go un-ridiculed.

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

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Not-voting is not revolutionary

  

Elections are looming and the "don't vote" brigade are once again out in force. I don't actually have anything against the concept of not voting, the people who annoy me are the ones who go around actively propagandising for other people to not-vote, as if they're participating in some kind of heroic anti-establishment revolution.

Not-voting isn't wrong in itself

Back in 2013 a friend of mine received their local election postal ballot but found that the only two candidates were a Tory (part of the coalition government they despised) and a Lib-Dem (part of the coalition government that they despised). I think their choice to tear the ballot paper into little pieces and send them off in the return envelope was perfectly justifiable.

The problem I have is with people who utter sub-Brandian platitudes like "if only everyone stopped voting then ..." because the huge glaring fault with this kind of assertion is that it's an exercise in extremely juvenile wishful thinking.

It's profoundly annoying that so many people keep repeating this kind of ludicrous appeal for everyone to "stop voting" based on the idea that revolutionary political change can be achieved through a vague hope that the powers that be will suddenly take notice if we all begin protesting against them by ... err ... doing nothing.

The PCC elections

A look at the results of the utterly farcical 2012 PCC elections in England demonstrate why this idle wish for mass non-participation doesn't have a hope of succeeding.

The average turnout for these ludicrous elections across the whole of England was just 15%, yet not a single one of the "winning" candidates refused to take up their cushy £65-£95,000 per year salaries because of their appalling lack of a democratic mandate. Several of the PCCs actually took up their positions with the backing of less than 5% of the eligible electorate in their constituencies!

The 2012 PCC elections were absolute proof that a lack of mandate from over 95% of the electorate still wasn't enough to prevent politicians from taking up their jobs. This leaves us with the question of how anyone thinks that wishfully appealing for everyone to just stop voting could ever result in revolutionary social change?

Even in the extraordinarily unlikely even that 99% of people refused to vote, it's still certain that the politicians themselves and their inner-circles of supporters would just cast a few dozen votes to "win" the election for themselves.

Not-voting is not revolutionary

There's nothing clever, or contrarian, or heroic about telling other people not to vote as if it's a revolutionary thing to do. It's a stupid stance that is literally indistinguishable from outright apathy when the voting statistics are compiled. If you want to make yourself indistinguishable from the hopelessly apathetic lumpenproletariat in the electoral statistics that's fine by me, but don't think that there's anything clever or revolutionary about telling other people to do it. There isn't.

Revolutionary social change certainly doesn't come about by taking the exact same non-action as the hopelessly apathetic. It comes about through direct action.

Social progress has been achieved when people have come together in solidarity to demand change from the powerful, when people educate themselves and educate each other, and when they cause enough economic disruption to cause the powerful and wealthy to give in to some of their demands (one of the best ways to frighten the wealthy and powerful is by threatening to hit them in the pocket).

Demographics

A look at the voter demographics from the 2015 General Election reveals a lot of interesting information about those who did and didn't vote. Old people are an awful lot more likely to vote Tory than young people, and they're also an awful lot more likely to actually vote too. The very wealthy are an awful lot more likely to vote than the very poor, and an awful lot more likely to actually vote Tory too.

Given these demographic trends is it any wonder that we ended up getting stuck with a Tory government that endlessly panders to the very wealthy and shields pensioners from the most brutal austerity measures, while they deliberately load the burden of their economic attacks on the poor, the young and the disabled?

If just a small fraction of the 35% of people who didn't bother to vote at all (either through apathy or disillusionment with the system) had've voted for anyone but the Tories, this extremely malicious and desperately incompetent government would never have achieved a majority of MPs, and they would never have been able to continue their project of tearing up long-standing British values and turning the UK into one of the most right-wing authoritarian state in the developed world.

Voting obviously isn't the "be all and end all" of politics

I'm entirely sceptical that revolutionary political change can be achieved through voting alone. Politics is about far more than scrawling a mark on a piece of paper every few years and then sitting back and waiting for the next paper scrawling exercise. The best way to effect political change is undoubtedly to demand it outside of the ballot box. However I do believe that voting is important because votes do determine who the custodians of political power are while progressive change is being demanded from those who are determined to achieve it.

The system is a mess, but not-voting won't fix it

The current system in the UK is an absolute disgrace, I know that this is the case because I spend so much of my time trying to expose the appalling malice, incompetence and corruption that's going on. However typing platitudinous "if only everyone would stop voting ..." type comments on political threads is definitely not the way to resolve the appalling problems we face, because it's absolutely clear that under the system we have, not-voting simply transfers even more political power to those who do vote.

Under the ludicrously unrepresentative Westminster voting system we suffer from, the sheer number of non-voters meant that the Tory party only needed 24% of the registered electorate to vote for them in order to gain a majority government.

As far as I'm concerned, anyone who thinks that simply not-voting is the route to revolutionary political change is even more delusional than the person who thinks that sticking a bit of paper in a box every few years is an adequate level of political engagement. 

Conclusion

If we want serious political change we need to educate ourselves, articulate it, demand it, fight for it.

Sticking a bit of paper in a box every few years is extremely unlikely to lead to revolutionary change, but it can help to ensure that things aren't quite as bad as they could be, while we build solidarity and take the direct action that is needed to promote the actual changes that we want to see.

If anyone thinks I'm wrong about not-voting doing nothing more than transferring more political power to those who do vote, I'd really like to see someone attempt to explain the exact mechanism by which an individual not-voting supposedly leads to revolutionary political change.

Make sure you are registered to vote

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

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