To get a measure of how utterly normalised we've become to Tory lawlessness, just consider the fact that they became the first government in UK history to be held in contempt of parliament for deliberately refusing to comply with a parliamentary vote to release the legal advice they received on Brexit, and it's already been forgotten about within days.
This is always the case. Tory lawlessness and contempt for democracy always gets swept under the carpet and forgotten about.
- Remember when Theresa May and the Tories were defeated in the Supreme Court over their efforts to completely sideline parliament in order to make democratic opposition to Theresa May's hard-right Brexit scheming impossible?
- Remember when the Tories absolutely gutted Legal Aid in order to price poor and ordinary people out of the justice system and make it almost impossible for the victims of their malicious and unjust welfare policies to seek justice in the courts?
This is a government riddled with contempt for parliamentary democracy and contempt towards the rule of law, yet they're barely ever held to account for it by the mainstream media. And on the rare occasions that the public do actually hear about these extraordinary scandals, the tendency is to shrug it all off as if lawlessness, corruption and contempt for democracy are normal and unavoidable, rather than outrageous and unacceptable.
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Just a year and a half after winning an unprecedented landslide victory the French President and his En Marche! "centrist" party have triggered a huge crisis with their policies of punishing workers and the poor, and pushing hard-right neoliberalism.
One of their first moves on assuming power was to lavish a huge tax cut on the wealthiest 1%, and ever since it's been one regressive and unpopular policy after another: Attacks on pensioners' incomes, anti-worker legislation, a move to flog off the French rail network to Macron's speculator mates, extremely unpopular education reforms, and the final straw was a series of fuel tax hikes designed to load the economic cost of combating climate change onto ordinary people, especially those who live in remote rural areas and rely on their cars for survival.
The result has been the rise of organic and leaderless gilets jaunes (yellow vests) mass demonstration all across France.
The mainstream media have obviously focused on examples of violence and vandalism in Paris in order to discredit the movement as much as possible, but the reality is that the vast majority of gilets jaunes protests are peaceful marches and roadblocks outside of Paris, which the overwhelming majority of French people support.
Within 18 months of Macron coming to power and imposing neoliberal policies and enforcing an unjustifiable upwards redistribution of wealth, the French public have had enough and they're fighting back.
Now just consider how different things are in Britain. It's over 8 years since the Lib-Dems enabled the Tories back into power (103 months). We've had ruinous austerity dogma, a massive unprecedented upwards redistribution of wealth, massive public service cuts, a ruinous "lost decade" of zero wage growth, draconian social security cuts, countless hard-right privatisation disasters (including the mass giveaway of state schools to unaccountable private profiteers), and shocking rises in child poverty, in-work poverty, and homelessness.
Not only has a gilets jaunes protest failed to materialise, but the British public have actually twice reelected the Tories who have been brutalising us like this!
The only hint of protest was the spectacular act of self-harm in allowing the very same hard-right Tories who trashed our standards of living (Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Iain Duncan Smith, Priti Patel ...) to convince us that immigrants and the EU were to blame for the horrific consequences of their own damned austerity policies and then voting for Brexit!
And when an opposition leader comes along to actually oppose the devastating hard-right fanaticism of the Tories (as opposed to pathetically imitating it like his predecessor) the political establishment, mainstream media hacks, and the "I'm alright Jack" chattering classes spew unprecedented amounts of hatred at him!*
Even now, after eight years of austerity dogma, wage repression, public service cuts, ruinous privatisations, and malicious attacks on the social security safety net, and two and a half years of stewing in their own damned Brexit mess, they're soaring high in the polls (between the high-30s and low-40s).
To really put this contrast between the Brits and the French into context consider the changes in our standards of living over the last decade.
While Brits have experienced an outrageous 0.5% per year collapse in real wage growth, the French have experienced annual real wage growth of 0.7%.
For the last decade French workers have experienced growing real terms wages (at just about the average rate for Europe), while the British have been slumped at the bottom of the table with other European stragglers like Greece, Italy, and Spain.
But who are the ones engaging in a mass popular revolt against neoliberalism and the greed of the mega-rich?
The French!
So what is it about the Brits that makes them such willing doormats?
What makes them so comfortable with the erosion of their wages and living standards that they actually vote in favour of the culprits rather than fighting back?
I'm not actually sure I can answer the question.
Yes, it surely has something to do with Britain having the most right-wing media environment in Europe which repeatedly gives free passes to outrageous examples of Tory malice and incompetence, whilst holding opposition figures to way higher standards.
Yes, it probably has something to do with traditional British attitudes like "stiff upper lip" and "make do and mend".
And yes, the sickening deference to establishment figures with plummy accents that's still rife in Britain is surely a factor in the almost total impunity for the Tory toffs who have spent most of the last decade ideologically vandalising our country and vindictively abusing our most vulnerable citizens.
But are these factors enough to explain why the French stand up for themselves and the Brits just sit there and take dogs' abuse from millionaire Tory elitists for years, and then actually vote the callous abusive bastards back into power?
What do you think?
How do you explain it?
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
Incidentally the Venn diagram of self-declared "centrists" who have been bitterly spewing hate at Jeremy Corbyn for the last three years, and those who greeted Macron's election in France as if it was the second coming of Christ would be more-or-less a perfect circle.
Dear Theresa,
One of the only arguments I've actually heard anyone actually make in favour of your last-minute shambles of a Brexit proposal is that we need to forget that you are a cold-hearted, ruthless, and self-serving Tory and back your Brexit proposal because it wouldn't be as economically damaging as a "no deal" flounce out of the EU.
This argument has a kernel of truth because the economic chaos of a "no deal" meltdown would undoubtedly be worse than the illogical and almost universally unpopular mess you and your Tory mates have cobbled together.
And we all know that under Tory rule it would be the poor and vulnerable who would be forced to suffer the costs of a "no deal" meltdown (while your mates Rees-Mogg, Redwood and mega-rich speculator class who bankroll your party would actually cash in on the crisis they created by speculating against Britain).
Just look at the way you lot callously loaded the burden of austerity dogma onto poor and ordinary people as you simultaneously lavished tax cuts and handouts on your mega-rich mates (you know the ones who bankroll your party).
But then there are four gaping flaws this argument that 'we should all pull together and back your rubbish deal because "no deal" would be worse'.
The Closed Tory Shop
If you wanted parliament and the nation to back your deal then you really shouldn't have run the whole Brexit show as a closed Tory shop for the last two years.
Not only did you deliberately exclude opposition MPs, devolved parliaments, UK business leaders, trade unions, academics and experts, charities, civic society, and everyone else from having a say in the negotiations, but you also fought tooth and nail to sideline parliamentary democracy too.
How many times has your autocratic Brexit scheming been defeated in the courts, and voted down in our sovereign parliament?
How many times did you attempt to hide Brexit impact assessments and legal advice from parliament and the public?
How many times did your chums in the right-wing propaganda rags whip up tidal waves of abuse and death threats against anyone who tried to hold you to account over your dictatorial and self-serving Brexit scheming (judges, academics, opposition MPs, you own damnend Tory MPs ...)?
You've cynically and deliberately excluded everyone from involvement for the last two years in order to run Brexit purely in the Tory party interest, and now you've actually resorted to begging us to get on board to back the absolute farce you incompetent Tories have cobbled together without our involvement!
Sorry Theresa. No. You don't get to repeatedly exclude everyone else from involvement and then beg us for support because you failed to "crush" the opposition in your ridiculous vanity election.
Stupid threats
The only reason that the threat of "no deal" is on the table at all is your stupidly threatening approach to the Brexit negotiations.
You were the one who lobbed the threat of a ruinous "no deal" flounce onto the negotiating table with all of the bravado of a spoilt toddler threatening to deliberately shit their own pants if they don't get the sweeties they're demanding.
Of course you need to have a fallback position if the negotiations don't go the way you want, but threatening to explode a massive economic bomb under the UK in the desperate hope that fear of the collateral damage would drive the EU into caving into your demands is such a woeful display of strategic ineptitude that (despite your obvious limitations) it's still surprising that it was the best that you could come up with.
And it absolutely beggars belief that your mates in the right-wing propaganda rags actually lavished praise on you for your pathetic toddler-tantrum of a negotiating strategy.
The basis of any competent negotiating strategy would have been to identify areas of mutual agreement (of which there are surely several) in order to develop a reasonable fallback position should the full negotiations end up in deadlock.
That you didn't work towards a reasonably safe fallback position is bad enough, but that you're actually using your own hyperbolic threat in order to coerce your fellow citizens into backing the hopeless shambles of a deal you've eventually come up with is beyond reprehensible.
Using your own incompetence to your political advantage in this way is so utterly appalling there simply aren't enough negative adjectives in the English language to accurately describe it.
100% reversal
The next thing to note is that using the threat of a "no deal" meltdown in order to coerce people into supporting your shambles of a deal is a 100% reversal of your previous position.
Don't you remember your endlessly repeated mantra that "no deal is better than a bad deal"?
Yet now you suddenly want us to believe your new position that your shitty deal is better than a no deal?
How thick do you think we are?
How much contempt towards the rest of us does it demonstrate that you expect us to not even notice that you've absolutely and totally reversed your position?
Did you honestly expect nobody to notice?
What the hell are you playing at?
Two better options
The fourth nail in the coffin for the argument that we should support your woeful deal because it's not as bad as a bad deal is obvious.
If we're assessing the options on which would be least bad for the British people and the British economy, there are clearly two vastly superior options to the false dichotomy you're presenting us with.
One is to let someone else have a go at the negotiations. Someone who is prepared to do it in an open, democratic and accountable manner in the national interest, rather than excluding everyone else to do it exclusively for the benefit of their own political party like you did.
Someone who is prepared to set up a wide-ranging Brexit commission, seek political consensus, avoid threats and divisive language, and conduct extensive research into what kind of Brexit the people of Britain actually want from the Brexit they so narrowly voted for in 2016.
If we were to get rid of you and Britain went back to the EU for an extension of Article 50 so that we could negotiate a Brexit-in-the-British-interest rather than a Brexit-in-the-Tory-party-political-interest, it's highly unlikely they'd say no isn't it?
The other less harmful option is obviously to remain in the EU and then seek to reform it from within to give Britain (and other member states) more leeway to pursue their own national interests from within the union.
We can all see that you're deliberately excluding other superior options ("back to square one" / "Remain and reform") in order to present your second-worst case scenario as better than a worst case scenario derived from your own damned threats.
And we can all see that the only barrier to both of these vastly superior options is you.
Your autocratic power grab has failed. You threw away any chance of forcing your unpopular Tory Brexit through parliament when you gambled your parliamentary majority away in your spectacularly failed vanity election (a cock up you would already have been forced out over if the rest of your party weren't such abject self-serving cowards).
It's clearly time for you to step aside and let someone else try to fix this outrageous mess that you and your predecessor Cameron have lumbered us with.
Aside from wishing to see the back of you, I genuinely wish you a quiet retirement that affords you the time to contemplate and truly consider the enormous legacy of damage you and your fellow Tories have wreaked on our nation with your ruinous austerity agenda (that created the wave of public anger that drove the Brexit vote marginally over the line), Cameron's spectacularly reckless Brexit gamble with the nation's future, and your self-serving, autocratic, and downright incompetent efforts to deal with the absolute mess your predecessor ran away from.
Tom (and everyone who shares links to this letter on your social media accounts)
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.
If you want to get to grips with the shocking levels of mainstream media bias in the UK just consider the reaction to Prime Minister's Questions on December 5th 2018.
Instead of criticising Theresa May for the absolutely shambolic state of her government, or the cynical and evasive scripted non-answers she responded with, or the usual cacophony of braying, jeering, and howling from the 300-odd millionaire elitists on the Tory benches, or the way she openly and contemptuously laughed in the face of the millions of workers her party has spent the last 8 years impoverishing, the BBC politics team and swathes of the mainstream media tried to create the absurd narrative that Theresa May somehow won the debate because Jeremy Corbyn asked the wrong questions!
The crux of their ridiculous narrative was that Jeremy Corbyn used his six questions to absolutely nail the Tory track record on poverty, collapsing wages, Universal Credit, and their grotesque publicity stunt the previous weekend of taking publicity photos in food banks (as if they're actually proud of their record of massively increasing poverty to the extent that huge numbers of people now rely on charitable food handouts to survive).
According the the bitter mainstream media hacks, Corbyn should have concentrated on Brexit minutae and the historic three defeats in a single day Theresa May's government had just suffered.
The absurdity of this warped anti-Corbyn narrative was beyond obvious.
It was always going to be the case that other MPs from all sides of the house (including Theresa May's own Tory backbenchers) would bring up Brexit, Theresa May's shambolic last-minute fudge of a deal, and the government's parliamentary defeats. Here's the SNP's Ian Blackford doing just that.
Another element of the ridiculousness is that the three parliamentary defeats Theresa May suffered came as a direct consequence of Jeremy Corbyn and his Labour Party colleagues voting against the government.
These defeats didn't just materialise out of nowhere like the mainstream media hacks want to present it, the happened because Jeremy Corbyn worked with other opposition MPs and a small bunch of Tory rebels to inflict them.
Yet another element of the ridiculousness is that there are 5 days of parliamentary debate scheduled on Theresa May's Brexit shambles before the crunch vote on December 11th. PMQs was one of the very few political opportunities to talk about any other issue for the entire week, and the hacks all supposedly wanted Corbyn to waste it away on even more Brexit bickering!
By choosing not to gloat about Monday's parliamentary defeats and focus on poverty and collapsing living standards Corbyn opened a second front of attack, and a really important one too.
If Theresa May's Brexit deal is going to be stopped, triggering either a General Election or another EU referendum, it's now absolutely vital to make the crucial point that stagnant wages, soaring poverty, collapsing public services, crumbing infrastructure have nothing to do with immigration and the EU and everything to do with 8 ruinous years of Tory austerity dogma, wage repression, and under-investment.
Then there's the fact that Corbyn's questions on poverty created an extraordinary clip that was so wildly inappropriate that it should have been widely broadcast and seen/heard by almost everyone. When Corbyn challenged Theresa May on Britain's "lost decade" of wage growth, she openly laughed about the collapsing living standards her party have inflicted.
- A damning United Nations report has slammed the Tories for replacing traditional British concern and compassion for vulnerable and suffering people with a "punitive, mean-spirited and callous approach".
And when Jeremy Corbyn challenged Theresa May on this absolutely outrageous track record, she actually sat there and laughed.
Instead of furiously attacking Jeremy Corbyn for asking vital questions about the poverty that is ruining the lives of millions, maybe mainstream media hacks could just have asked one single question about whether it was appropriate for Theresa May to sit there and laugh at the appalling wave of poverty the Tories have created?
But no. Holding Theresa May to account simply isn't part of their remit.
Even when her government is in chaos and she's openly laughing at the millions of people her party have deliberately impoverished, mainstream media hacks deliberately switch targets and aim their fury at Jeremy Corbyn for clinically highlighting a Tory track record of failure that extends way beyond recklessly gambling away the nation's future to nick a few thousand UKIP votes, then wasting two years cobbling together an absolute shambles of a Brexit plan.
For them it was an unforgivable mistake for Corbyn to have cornered Theresa May on poverty, and to even create the shocking situation where she openly and publicly laughed at the millions of workers her party have impoverished (a clip they would have shared with the nation if they had any intention of actually doing their jobs rather than cobbling together ludicrously tendentious anti-Corbyn outrage pieces).
What they apparently wanted to hear sequence of questions about the convoluted intricacies of Brexit with very limited appeal to people who live outside the Westminster bubble.
Think about it. If you're one of the millions who are struggling to put food on the table or heat your home, and can't even imagine how you're going to give your kids any kind of enjoyable Christmas, the last thing you want to hear is politicians quibbling about backstops, Brexit legal advice, a thing called a "Grieve amendment", etc.
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Since the Tories came to power in 2010 rates of poverty in the United Kingdom have soared, and ever more people have found themselves in such dire economic circumstances that they've had to resort to charitable food handouts from an ever expanding network of food banks.
The Tories always bluster on about how "work is the best route out of poverty" but what they don't ever admit is that under their extreme economic mismanagement the number of UK workers living in poverty has been increasing way faster than the new jobs Tory ministers keep bragging about.
The upshot of this deliberate Tory policy of turning the UK into a low-wage economy is that four million British workers are living in poverty, and ever increasing numbers of working people are becoming reliant upon food bank charity in order to feed themselves and their families.
You would have thought that the dire consequences of this ideologically driven Tory assault on the economic well-being of UK workers would be a source of shame for them, but you'd be making the mistake of imagining that members of this grotesque elitism club are capable of feelings like guilt, remorse, or shame.
In fact the Tories are so shameless that they actually decided to launch a coordinated publicity stunt to gloat about the wave of food poverty they've inflicted.
It's difficult to imagine the thinking processes of the Tory wonks who came up with a coordinated effort to send Tory MP out to their local food banks for publicity pictures to upload onto Twitter.
Perhaps they thought that pictures of Tory MPs at food banks would cast them in a sympathetic light as if they actually care about people in poverty?
Aside from the fact that numerous Tories were so inept at pretending they cared about poor people that they all lazily copied the same copy n' paste Tweets, there was also the obvious public backlash to consider.
Soaring rates of poverty in the UK didn't just happen by chance. The huge rise in families in such poverty that they can't afford to feed themselves are the result of eight devastating years of Tory economic misrule.
- Not only have the Tories overseen a historic collapse in the value of workers' wages, they've also attacked the social security system for low-paid workers. Arbitrary and ideologically driven cuts to Tax Credits, Housing Benefit, parental pay, and Child Benefit have dumped huge numbers of workers into destitution.
- The Tory decision to engineer a deliberate six week wait into applications for Universal Credit has also left huge numbers of families in destitution, because the last thing you need when you lose your job is six weeks without a penny as you wait for Universal Credit to kick in.
- The shocking rise in Zero Hours Contracts and fake self-employment jobs in the gig economy have created levels of job insecurity not seen since the 1930s.
- Tory austerity dogma has resulted in economic stagnation, shocking under-investment in infrastructure and public services the slowest post-crisis economic recovery in Centuries, and startling collapses in economic demand and productivity. All of which has made Britain a much poorer place than it could have been under a sensible investment-based economic recovery strategy.
In light of these factors is it any wonder that huge numbers of people saw the Tory food bank publicity campaign as the political equivalent of depraved trophy hunters posing beside the carcasses of the wild animals they've shot?
It just goes to show how wildly out of touch with reality most Tories must be that none of them even questioned the wisdom of a deliberate coordinated effort to associate themselves with the appalling wave of food poverty they've created.
The fact that their ruinous hard-right anti-welfare anti-worker, anti-investment policies have created such suffering and destitution is bad enough, but their total bone-headed willingness to even recognise what they've done makes them utterly unfit to rule ever again.
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.
Over the last week France has been rocked by the biggest riots in over a decade but much of the media coverage has been sketchy at best.
Fuel protest
The gilets jaunes (yellow vests) movement started as a grassroots protest against a hugely unpopular hike in fuel tax designed to load the economic burden of climate change goals onto ordinary people, and especially those in non-urban areas who rely on cars to survive.
That these planned tax rises on petrol and diesel have coincided with a global spike in fuel prices has exacerbated the situation, leaving millions of French families wondering where they're going to find the cash to pay for these huge fuel price hikes.
Climate change
As gilets jaunes the movement has spread it has evolved and grown into a much broader protest against Emmanuel Macron and the French government.
Macron and his supporters keep on banging on about ecology and how progressive it is to tax fuel, but they're talking a completely different language to the people facing the economic burden of these policies.
Of course a lot of people accept that something needs to be done to combat climate change, but loading the majority of the burden onto ordinary people who have no choice but to drive, whilst actually giving handouts to the mega-rich with the other hand is the exact opposite of a progressive approach.
Anyone trying to characterise the gilets jaunes movement as a simple fuel protest against reasonable and progressive climate change measures is either catastrophically under-informed or behaving in a deliberately disingenuous manner.
Yellow vests
The reason for the yellow vests is that since 2008 French drivers have been required by law to have a yellow high visibility vest in their vehicle in case of breakdown, meaning that high visibility jackets are a cheap and widely available symbolic "uniform" for the protesters.
Violence
The vast majority of the 280,000+ gilets jaunes protesters have been peaceful and non-violent, but as is always the way the vast majority of the mainstream media coverage has focused on the violent minority.
This isn't an effort to downplay or excuse any of the unacceptable violence and vandalism, it's just an effort to redress the balance a bit by pointing out that the violence and chaos in Paris is unrepresentative of the enormous movement that is going on across the whole of France.
Delegitimisation
Assorted 'centrists' and Macron fanboys have tried to create the argument that the entire movement "lost legitimacy as soon as it turned to rioting/looting/car burning".
The problem with this tactic of tarring an entire movement of hundreds of thousands with the behaviour of the very worst minority is that it would make it ridiculously easy to render all political protest illegitimate through the tactical insertion of a small number of violent agent provocateurs into any and all protest movements.
Any reasonable person should be capable of differentiating between the hundreds of thousands of non-violent protesters across France who blocked roads and fuel depots without rioting or violence, and the small minority of lawless thugs the media have concentrated on.
The price of Macron
When Emmanuel Macron won the French Presidency "I'm alright Jack" centrists across the world went into raptures that their favoured brand of neoliberalism-lite was back on the agenda, but now that Macron's opinion poll ratings have collapsed to minus 50, hundreds of thousands of people are actively protesting against the government, and the streets of Paris are ablaze, perhaps it's time for a quick reappraisal.
Macron only won the Presidency because the only other option on the ballot was the hate-mongering extreme-right ultranationalist Marine Le Pen. In a choice between the neoliberal frying pan and the fascist fire, the French public understandably chose to stay in the frying pan.
As you'd expect from a neoliberal with a huge parliamentary majority, the result has been a massive squeeze on poor and ordinary people in order to fund handouts and tax cuts for the mega-rich.
It's not like the French public could have had any illusions about what was going to happen given that Macron was personally responsible for the massively unpopular anti-worker legislation that destroyed the parti socialiste from within before he jumped ship to create a 'centrist' protest movement against the political establishment that he was one of the worst examples of!
Given the long history of public protest in France, a revolt against Macron and his neoliberal agenda was always on the cards, the only surprising thing being that it's taken so long to happen.
Rebellion
One of the big ironies is that Macron connived his way into power by creating and leading a faux rebellion against the French political establishment, yet he's only halfway into his second year in office and he's the focus of a new, more genuine, and more furious anti-establishment revolt.
If you promise the people a revolution and a government that listens to and works on behalf of ordinary people, then deliver nothing but a 'more of the same' anti-worker, neoliberal agenda, is it any wonder they'd be furious?
Social media
The gilets jaunes movement began on social media with petitions and a Facebook event aimed at disrupting traffic on November 17th. Since then it's spread onto the streets.
The spontaneous social media growth of the protest means there's no real defined leadership structure, which has its advantages and disadvantages.
Extreme-right opportunism
The French extreme-right have been quick to jump on the protests with Macron's defeated Presidential rival Marine Le Pan trying to associate herself with the movement and encouraging her supporters to infiltrate it.
The structureless and leaderless nature of the movement has made it possible for the French extreme-right to infiltrate the protests, but this leaderless nature also prevents them from usurping it by establishing themselves as its leaders.
Popularity
Various opinion polls have put public support for the gilets jaunes at between 72% and 84%. meaning Macron is in a really tricky situation. He's styled himself as an authoritarian who won't give in to protest, but he's only going to increase his (already extraordinary) levels of unpopularity if he seeks to crush this extremely popular movement by force.
The squeezed middle
The reason the gilets jaunes movement is so popular is that they're representing the frustration of millions of ordinary French people who feel they're getting insufficient return for their labour and their taxes.
Like most Europeans the French are reasonably content to pay high taxes in return for quality public services, decent pensions, and a strong social security system, however Macron's fuel tax hikes have coincided with hardline neoliberal policies from Macron such as gutting the social security system, attacking pensions, and attempting to flog off the French rail network to his private sector mates. And to top it all off one of Macron's first reforms was to slash wealth taxes paid for the extremely rich.
Of course anti-worker legislation, privatisation mania, attacks on the social security system, and massive handouts to the mega-rich must sound familiar to British people who have been suffering these same policies under 8 years of disastrous Tory rule, but the French are different. They won't just sit back and accept this ideologically-driven assault on their living standards, and even twice re-elect the bastards who have been doing it like the British have, they're making it clear they're simply not having it.
What next?
With Macron outright refusing to drop the next 6.5% hike in fuel prices sceduled for January, and with such high levels of public support it seems unlikely the gilets jaunes protests will just stop altogether any time soon.
The extent to which the protests continue over the next few weeks and months would seem to depend on whether Macron decides to cede ground by dropping the planned fuel hike, or intensifies the situation by outright ignoring the concerns of protesters and seeking to forcibly clamp down on the protests by imposing emergency legislation.
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.
