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.

 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 leadership pitch is a pack of lies

It's no wonder Boris Johnson skipped over his shameful and shambolic tenure as Foreign Secretary in order to gloss up his record as London Mayor to pitch for the job of Tory Prime-Minister-by-default.

People are far more likely to have forgotten his tenure as London Mayor than recent stuff like the Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe farce, "fuck business", gratuitous Nazi comparisons, endless gaffes and insults, and quitting his job to oppose Theresa May's Brexit deal only to decide to actually vote in favour of it the 3rd time she put it before parliament!

Also people outside of London are less likely to know how lazy and incompetent he was because they didn't have to deal with it on a day-to-day basis.

So Johnson and his backers have decided to create a revisionist history of his glorious time as London Mayor that would have made Stalin proud.

Crime

Johnson's boast that he cut crime in London is staggeringly dishonest. Crime was falling when he came to power, but then he administered the process of annihilating London policing once his Tory mates and their vile Lib-Dem enablers took over government in 2010.

Tory austerity resulted in a 30% reduction in police numbers, and a 65% reduction in Community Support Officers (a reduction from 18,937 police and CSOs to 11,576 in just 8 years).

£600 million was slashed from the London police budget and 120 police buildings were shut down and sold off to property developers.

By the end of Boris Johnson's tenure the consequences of this agenda were becoming clear, knife crime rose in his last two years in office, and violent crime has continued to soar ever since (with ever-cynical Tories attempting to blame this violent crime epidemic on Johnson's successor Sadiq Khan!).

Investment

One of the biggest cons the Tories pulled when they got into power was their use of the austerity narrative to justify reducing infrastructure spending in Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales, and the north of England whilst actually increasing infrastructure spending in London and the wealthy south east.

With London getting £24 per person spent on transport for every £1 per person in the north east of England, it's no wonder Johnson resorts to infrastructure boasting. When the game was so ridiculously rigged in his favour he'd be a fool not to.

However a look at some of the waste that went on under his watch tells us that London could probably have benefited an awful lot more from this vast spending disparity with someone competent in charge of delivering infrastructure projects.

£53 million wasted on the Garden Bridge project that never went ahead, a £40 million overspend on Routemaster busses, £24 million on the cable car to nowhere (a truly extraordinary sight for us northerners who have suffered one cancelled infrastructure project after another), £5.2 million on an Estuary Airport that never got built, renting West Ham the Olympic stadium for just £2.5 million a year when it cost £323 million to build and then convert, and another £300,000 spraffed up a wall on unusable water cannons that were eventually flogged off as scrap.

Living Wage

Every time the Tories boast about their "living wage" decent people should be absolutely furious at the Orwellian chicanery.

The National Minimum Wage was invented by Labour and vehemently opposed by the Tories at the time.

In 2016 David Cameron decided to rebrand the Minimum Wage as "living wage" principally to undermine the work of the Living Wage Foundation who promote the idea that the minimum wage should provide enough for people to live on.

Their calculation for London is £10.55 per hour. The Tory fake "living wage" in London is £8.21.

So when Boris Johnson brags about this fake Tory "living wage", he's actually bragging about employers underpaying London workers by £2.34 per hour.

Housing

The Tory track record on housing is absolutely atrocious. Between 2010 and 2017 they oversaw the lowest level of peacetime house building since the 1920s. They also deliberately pumped up the unsustainable house price bubble again by restricting supply and inflating prices with ludicrous schemes like Help to Buy. They slashed the already shockingly low levels of social home construction, And to top it all off they decided to redefine "affordable housing" as a £450,000 starter home in Greater London.

Boris Johnson contributed to this atrocious track record by missing his targets on affordable housing, and virtually eradicating new council housing in London.

Pollution

Of all of the issues that Boris Johnson should be keeping quiet about, London air pollution is up there with the fact that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is still in an Iranian jail after his decision to lazily repeat Iranian accusations against her as facts in parliament.

In 2013 the consultancy firm Aether handed in a report on London air pollution to Boris Johnson's administration, but instead of publishing it, they buried it for two and a half years until it was found by Sadiq Khan's team when he took over.

The report detailed shocking disparities in toxic nitrous oxide pollutants between poor and wealthy areas.

Instead of doing anything about it Johnson and his cronies just buried the report, and now he's got the absolute gall to brag about what a wonderful job he did of combating air pollution!

Alternative facts

Despite the fact Johnson's Tweet is incredibly deceptive, it's still generated hundreds of shares and thousands of likes, demonstrating his Trump-like relationship with his supporters.

It doesn't actually matter what he does, or how many lies he tells, the people who adore Johnson aren't actually interested in any of that stuff.

If reality gets in the way of their Boris-fandom, then it's quite clearly reality that has to make way, and unfortunately it's a tiny band of around 70,000 Tory tribalists, Brextremist infiltrators, and BoJo-worshippers who get to pick the next Tory Prime-Minister-by-default, while the other 70 million of us have to deal with the consequences.

 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 giveaway is a bribe to those with the actual power to make him Prime Minister

Boris Johnson has announced he plans to introduce a huge tax cut for people earning over £50,000 per year.

Despite mainstream media assertions that this tax cut is aimed at the middle class or the "aspirational class", it's obviously a tax cut aimed at the wealthiest people in society.

You hardly have to be an expert in how marginal tax rates work to understand that the biggest benefits accrue to the highest earners.

Anyone earning below £50,000 per year, which is around 92% of UK workers, will see absolutely no tax reduction whatever.

Some middle class guy earning £55,000 per year is only going to see a 5% tax reduction on £5,000 of his income, which works out at £250 per year.

Meanwhile everyone earning over £80,000 would feel the benefit of the full £1,500.

Boris Johnson's tax giveaway would cost £9.6 billion per year in order to hand out an extra £1,500 per year to the 5% of highest earners with salaries of over £6,667 per month, with diminishing benefits down to those on £4,167 per month, and absolutely nothing for anyone earning less than that!

Some clueless "centrists" like Dan Hodges have been asking why on earth Johnson would announce a policy of enriching the 5% of highest earners at the expense of everyone else, noting that such a policy would play right into the hands of Jeremy Corbyn and surely make him Prime Minister (as if Prime Minister Corbyn would be a terrible thing in comparison to the absolute shit-show of hypocrites, charlatans, and psychopaths that constitutes the Tory leadership race).

The answer to Hodges' question is stunningly obvious.

Boris Johnson likes to play the harmless buffoon, but he actually knows exactly what he's doing here.

He knows the general public don't actually have any say whatever on who becomes the next Tory leader.

The people who actually get a say on who becomes our next Prime Minister are primarily his fellow Tory MPs, who are obviously influenced by the corporate fat cats who bankroll the entire Tory operation.

Then it'll be up to the Tory party membership, who are heavily influenced by mainstream media.

All Tory MPs would personally benefit from Johnson's tax giveaway. The bankers and corporate fat cats who bankroll the Tory party would obviously all see the full benefit of this handout too.

Salaries of £80k+ are hardly uncommon in newsrooms, and all political editors will be taking home bigger salaries than that.

And it's hard to say for sure (because the Tories are so reluctant to admit how many members they've got, let alone who they are) but a hefty proportion of them are likely to be "I'm alright Jack" bastards on incomes of above six grand a month who are still perfectly happy with Tory austerity fanaticism, even after nine ruinous years, because the dire consequences always fall on other people.

In other words Boris Johnson's tax giveaway isn't aimed at generating public popularity at all, it's aimed at winning the support of those with the actual power to make him Prime Minister.

His winning strategy is to appeal to the personal greed of high income Tories and mainstream media hacks, and screw everyone else.

It's nothing short of a £9.6 billion bribe to the wealthiest people in society, paid for by the rest of us, with the sole purpose of persuading the extremely wealthy to give him the power he craves.

 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

It's not the drugs, it's the hypocrisy

Two contenders in the Tory leadership race have now admitted to taking drugs. Michael Gove has owned up to snorting cocaine on multiple occasions, while Rory Stewart admits that he smoked opium.

Now I'm certainly not going to moral high horse about drug use because I'm a strong believer in rational drugs policy aimed at regulation, harm reduction, and treatment rather than the prohibitionist orthodoxy of unregulated black markets, criminalisation, and imprisonment.

But it's impossible not to clock the absolute hypocrisy of these men.

They've both served in a militantly prohibitionist Tory regime for nine years which not only maintained draconian punishments for possession and use of the very Class A substances like cocaine and opioids they've admitted using, but actually introduced a raft of harsh new punishments on substances like the mild stimulant khat (which is mainly used by the Somalian immigrant community) despite their own scientific advisers pointing out that khat is such a mild stimulant that it would be inappropriate and disproportionate to criminalise it [source].

One of the most absurd new anti-drugs laws these hypocritical Tories supported was Theresa May's kafkaesque legislation banning all drugs that haven't even been invented yet!

These hypocrites believe in other people suffering severe criminal punishments for possession of mild and virtually harmless stimulants and even drugs that don't even exist yet, but feel absolutely fine snorting cocaine and smoking opioids themselves!

These Tories firmly believe in criminalisation and imprisonment for thousands upon thousands of people from poor and ordinary backgrounds for using much less harmful and addictive substances such as cannabis, magic mushrooms, khat, MDMA, and mephedrone, while they've used much more harmful and addictive drugs like cocaine and opiods without the slightest worry that they'd ever end up in jail for it.

Politicians like Gove and Stewart support the draconian prohibitionist orthodoxy because they quite simply don't believe that the laws apply to people like them in the elitist establishment class.

As far as they're concerned the drug laws exist in order to keep the "lower orders" in line, while the wealthy and privileged like them can do whatever they like with absolute impunity.

So it's not the fact that they've used drugs, it's the sheer hypocrisy of these wannabe Prime Ministers actively supporting harsh prohibitionist drug laws for ordinary people because they know that the rules simply don't apply to elitists like them.

Who on earth wants to be led by people who believe in one harsh and punitive set of rules for the majority of us, and another extremely lax and forgiving set of rules just for them and their elitist mates?

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

OR

The great Faragist deceit

Brexit Party and the Faragists know exactly what they're doing when it comes to propaganda. Make as many false-promises to as many people as possible in the hope that they're dumb enough to believe that they'll actually follow through on any of it.

Their position on British Steel is absolutely extraordinary. They've proposed a John Lewis style workers' partnership to save the institution from insolvency, but they also propose reducing UK tariffs on almost all imports to zero, meaning the UK would be absolutely flooded with cheap imports, meaning the inevitable ruination of the British Steel industry, workers' partnership or not.

But besides the fact that their stated aims are mutually contradictory nonsense, it gets even worse. The candidate they're standing in the Peterborough by-election is a guy called Mike Greene who works for a private investment fund called Greybull Capital LLP.

These are the owners who have driven British Steel into insolvency, which is just one of the numerous company collapses they've overseen in recent years.

They were behind the collapse of Monarch Airlines that collapsed owing £500 million to suppliers and creditors, and leaving 110,000 stranded tourists across Europe who needed repatriating at a cost of £60 million to the British taxpayer.

Then there was the subsequent collapse of the spun-off Monarch Aircraft Engineering the following year with the loss of 408 jobs.

Snooker and pool fans will remember the collapse of Rileys in 2012, which was then acquired by Greybull who then flogged off half the chain's sites before ditching the lot in 2014. Rileys was destroyed, but Greybull made a 10% profit on their dealings so hooray for them eh?

They were involved in the Comet buyout before the electrical retailer collapsed into insolvency in 2013 triggering the loss of 7,000 jobs. This bankruptcy resulted in a £25 million loss to the public purse in unpaid VAT.

Then there was the collapse of My Local in 2016 with the loss of 1,200 jobs, with Greene intimately involved in that particular Greybull insolvency.

And now in 2019 we've got Greybull driving British Steel into administration too, with 5,000 jobs at risk, and another 2,000 through supply chains.

And Brexit Party are gleefully fielding one of Greybull's senior figures as their parliamentary candidate in the Peterborough by-election.

And herein lies the great deceit of the Faragists.

They appeal to people's patriotism and pretend that it's the prideful British thing to do to vote for the most militant form of Brexit possible, but then their first candidate ever for parliament is a guy who works for a faceless vulture fund that's driven loads of British businesses into insolvency, destroyed literally thousands of British jobs, and left the UK taxpayer footing the bill time and time again.

They're not pushing a "no deal" Brexit because they think it'll be good for Britain, they're pushing it because they know that they can make vast amounts of money by betting against Britain, the Pound, and British companies as they push the UK economy over an avoidable cliff.

Then they can make even more by flooding their ill-gotten gains back into the UK to buy up £billions in distressed British assets on the cheap in the resulting chaos.

They want to do to Britain what Mike and his Greybull mates have been doing to British companies like Monarch, Rileys, My Local, Comet, and British Steel.

"No deal" Brexit is a deeply unpatriotic national asset stripping strategy being sold to the gullible as the patriotic thing to support, but the fact that the Brexit Party's first ever parliamentary candidate is a key player in the Greybull asset-stripping operation tells you all you need to know.

But then the bookies have Greene and Brexit Party as favourites to win in Peterborough, so none of the opposition parties are being clear enough in highlighting this guy's insolvency-strewn CV.

 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 did the Greens end up fumbling so many left and progressive votes to the Lib-Dem neoliberals?

Under the circumstances the Green Party did pretty poorly at the European elections.

Yes I know I'm going to have to explain this in light of the fact that they won their biggest share of the vote since they bagged 14.5% in 1989, and their most seats ever with 7 MEPs, and got the wonderful Magid Magid into the European Parliament to represent the Yorkshire and Humber region that was electing the BNP there just 10 years ago.

12% of the vote is an improvement on the Green performance last time around, but under the unique political circumstances it's actually a pretty poor showing.

The Greens should have done really well because they're unambiguously on the progressive side of the three most burning political issues of our time.

Their name alone is evidence enough that they're serious about combating environmental degradation, they've been campaigning against the blight of ruinous Tory austerity since well before Jeremy Corbyn took Labour back from the orthodoc neoliberals and put an end to the austerity-imitating gibberish that lost them the 2015 General Election, and they're unambiguously opposed to Brexit.

Add in the stuff like the Extinction Rebellion protests, the School Strikes for Climate Action, ever growing awareness of the mess we're making of this planet, and we've got to be left asking if 2019 wasn't the time for the Greens to break through into the political mainstream, when will it be?

There's plenty of ground for arguing that their obsession with an "another roll of the dice" referendum is a massive waste of Green political energy, but there's no doubt that if you're a social progressive who really wants to stay in the EU so much you'll gamble everything on a referendum despite the Tories still in power to rig the whole thing in their own favour, then the Greens are obviously the ones for you (unless you're from Scotland or Wales where the SNP and Plaid Cymru also have justifiable claims to represent progressive Brexit-sceptics).

But somehow the Greens got absolutely steamrollered by the pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, welfare-vandalising, wage-repressing, infrastructure-underinvesting Lib-Dem neoliberals who were the venal self-serving charlatans who wilfully helped the Tories lay the groundwork for Brexit to happen in the first place by trashing our wages, public services, social safety net, and living standards between 2010 and 2015.

Somehow, out of the minority of those who could be arsed to vote in the Euro elections (just 35.6% bothered), the majority of the anti-Brexit vote went to the disgustingly unrepentant Lib-Dems, rather than to the Green Party who had exactly the same anti-Brexit stance, but with absolutely none of the austerity blood on their hands.
 

The rise of the Greens in Germany puts the UK Greens' failure into perspective. Despite no Brexit bandwagon to leap onto the German Greens doubled their vote to 20.5% and bagged 21 MEPs, meaning they finished in second place behind Angela Merkel's centre-right CDU.

In the days after the election the German Greens have risen further with the post-Euro election bounce lifting them to the top of an opinion poll for the first time in their history on 27%.

Meanwhile in the UK it's the austerity-enforcing, wage-repressing, renewable subsidy-slashing, public service-trashing, welfare-vandalising, Royal Mail-privatising Lib-Dems who are gleefully basking in the post-Euro election bounce at the top of outlier polls.

It's difficult to get down to why the Green campaign has faltered so badly in the UK, when all the factors seemed to be pointing in their favour. But as someone who is broadly supportive of their party (especially on stuff like opposing austerity, protecting the environment, and renationalisation) I'll have a go:

Mainstream media bias: The Greens have fought tooth and nail for years to try to get fairer representation in the mainstream media, but to no avail. They're continually locked out of election debates, denied party political broadcasts, and treated as a minor party, even though they went into the 2019 Euro elections with triple the seats of the supposedly bigger Lib-Dems.

Leadership structure: The Greens have an unusual joint leadership between Siân Berry and Jonathan Bartley instead of one high profile leader. It's possible that this unusual leadership structure make them seem more like well meaning political amateurs than a serious political party. However this doesn't explain the disparity between the UK and German Greens because they too have a shared leadership structure. Perhaps the polarised hyper-partisan, and divisive nature of British politics means Brits are somewhat less open to ideas like shared leadership and compromise?

Leadership figures: One of the German Greens' co-leaders is Robert Habeck who is an almost ubiquitous figure in the German media and a former government minister in the Schleswig-Holstein region, and the other co-leader is Annalena Baerbock who is a member of the Bundestag (the main German parliament). Neither Jonathan Bartley nor Siân Berry have anything like as high profiles (Bartley is a local councillor in Lambeth, and Berry has a seat in the London Assembly which is an institution barely mentioned by ordinary folk in London, let alone us yokels outside of it). Unfortunately Caroline Lucas is still the only major figure in the UK Green Party ranks, but it's understandable that she wants to concentrate on her duties in parliament rather than acting as party figurehead.

Naivety: All the stuff about forming electoral pacts with the Lib-Dems and the CUK squatters before the Euro elections was extremely poor from a Green perspective. Instead of positioning themselves as making a more or less identical/interchangeable anti-Brexit offer as the two overtly neoliberal Remain parties, they should have strongly and clearly distanced themselves and made it clear that they were the only UK-wide Remain party willing to address the actual causes of Brexit in the first place (austerity, wage repression, public service cuts, welfare vandalism, infrastructure underinvestment ...). Presenting themselves as Lib-Dem allies in the fight against Brexit allowed the ever cynical Lib-Dems to use "tactical voting guides" to lure people into abandoning the Greens and voting Lib-Dem as the supposedly biggest Remain party. Failure to heed the basic  political axiom "never trust the Lib-Dems" is remarkably naive stuff.

General antipathy: One factor that it would be easy to overlook is the general UK public antipathy towards the Greens. We've all seen people dismissing them as mung bean-weaving, sandal-wearing, hippy-dippy fruitcakes over the years. Maybe the Greens seriously need to think about toughening up their image as seasoned battlers in the existential crisis that out-of-control capitalism is inflicting on our planet?

Lack of clarity: By presenting themselves as being basically inter-changeable Remain protest votes with the Lib-Dems and CUK squatters, the Greens threw away their chance to explain why they were the better alternative and handed all the political momentum to the more establishment-friendly Lib-Dems.

Poor strategy: In the final days before the EU election practically all I noticed from Green activists on Twitter were efforts to pinch left-leaning Labour voters by attacking Labour's Brexit position, rather than focusing on convincing the sizeable and defined Remain demographic to vote Green instead of the austerity-enabling Lib-Dems. Instead of appealing to a large well defined demographic as the best option with no austerity baggage, they were wasting their efforts on desperately trying to erode a final few Labour votes from a party already reduced down to its core support.
 

Ineffectiveness: Even though a lot Green effort was expended on trying to pinch Labour votes during the the final days of the Euro election campaign, the evidence suggests that far more Labour supporters deserted to the pro-austerity Lib-Dems than to the anti-austerity Greens! If the Greens failed to even convince Labour deserters to back them instead of the pro-austerity Lib-Dem Tory collaborators, they clearly failed quite spectacularly. Someone within the Green ranks would have to conduct the autopsy but letting millions of left and centre-left votes slip through their fingers to be gobbled up by the orthodox neoliberal Lib-Dems was a disaster.

Differences in the traditional left: The traditional left SPD party in Germany has completely lost its way and people are crying out for an alternative. Jeremy Corbyn has revitalised the Labour Party, binned the orthodox neoliberal tripe that was driving voters away in their millions, and returned to genuine democratic socialism. Even though the low-turnout Euro Elections were incredibly poor for Labour, they haven't been floundering as badly as the German Social Democrat Party for the past four years. Coming up against a stronger traditional left than the German Greens still doesn't explain how the UK Greens let so many votes slip through their fingers to the Lib-Dems though.

Brexit fixation: Perhaps the German Greens did so well not despite the lack of a Brexit bandwagon to jump on, but because of it? Perhaps jumping on the exact same People's Vote bandwagon as the Lib-Dems and CUK squatters ended up obscuring and diluting the core Green policies that differentiate them from the pro-austerity neoliberal parties they decided to side with? Perhaps Brexit brain worms cost the Greens their best ever chance at making the breakthrough to the political big time?

It would be a futile task to try to identify one single reason that the Greens faltered and fumbled millions of potential votes through their fingers in the UK to the benefit of a bunch of unrepentant neoliberals, while the Greens surged to position themselves as the 2nd party in German politics, but it's important for UK Greens to avoid celebrating marginal gains when they should have been making significant headway, and for them to get a feel of what went so wrong so they can learn from their mistakes.

If you've got any other ideas about why the Greens faltered so badly, feel free to share them in the comments.

 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

Brexit is a £1 trillion con job

Just over a decade ago the British state conjured up staggering amounts of money in order to save the City of London financial sector from insolvency.

This unprecedented tsunami of cash included £200 billion in liquidity support, £76 billion to bail out RBS and Lloyds, £40 billion to bail out Bradford and Bingley and the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, £280 billion in insurance cover for financial sector assets, and £435 billion in quantitative easing.

In 2010 the general public decided to punish Labour for having been in power during the financial sector insolvency crisis by replacing them with a Tory/Lib-Dem coalition (despite the fact that the Tories had been squealing for even more financial sector deregulation even right up until the financial sector meltdown was kicking off!).

The Tories and their despicable Lib-Dem enablers immediately began loading the cost of the bailouts onto ordinary British people via a ruinous programme of austerity fanaticism, unprecedented wage repression, devastating public service cuts, deliberate under-investment in infrastructure, and vandalism of the social safety net.

Meanwhile they continually lavished vast tax cuts and extravagant handouts on corporations and the mega-rich, as they raided the infrastructure budgets of Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and northern England to further boost spending in already wealthier areas like London and the south east.

The consequences of these policies were absolutely dire. The slowest economic recovery in two Centuries, the longest period of real terms wage depreciation since records began, soaring child poverty and in-work poverty, unprecedented cuts to the education system, unprecedented cuts to local government budgets, catastrophically failing public services like the NHS, police & fire service, tens of thousands driven into early graves, the most unaffordable housing in history ...

And then David Cameron decided to gamble the entire nation's future in order to nick a few thousand UKIP votes at the 2015 General Election.

An environment of collapsing wages, insecure jobs, soaring poverty, failing public services, unaffordable housing, and an annihilated social security system was exactly what the Brexiteers needed in order to push Leave marginally over the winning line in the 2016 referendum.

All they needed to do was blame the consequences of these devastating domestic policies on immigrants and the EU, then watch the votes flood in as the Tories and Lib-Dems outright refused to admit the truth, that it was actually them to blame for the living standards collapse, not immigration or the EU.

The austerity fanatics and their vile austerity-enabling sidekicks couldn't counteract the lie without implicating themselves, so they just sat back allowed the lie to stand, and allowed Leave to win.

Britain has been in a state of constitutional chaos ever since, especially so after Theresa May decided to give the British public the chance to get rid of the Tories who created this Brexit chaos in the first place, and instead of seizing the opportunity we decided to intensify the chaos by keeping them in power but without a majority so that the government was beholden to the Northern Irish DUP sectarians and the ERG Brextemists in the Tory ranks.

Hence huge numbers of financial institutions simply giving up on all the chaos and uncertainty in the UK to seek economic refuge in the safety of the Single Market, taking £1 trillion in assets with them as they flee.

Dublin, Frankfurt, Paris, and Luxemburg being the main beneficiaries so far.

So that's £1 trillion in financial sector bailouts. The British people being forced to cover the cost of these bailouts through Tory/Lib-Dem austerity fanaticism. Then a furious backlash against collapsing living standards resulting in the financial sector pissing off out of Britain taking £1 trillion in assets with them!

The saddest thing of all is that millions of Brits remain absolutely incapable of seeing this con go on right in front of their eyes, and it's not just an inability to synthesise information without allowing the mainstream media propagandists to do their thinking for them that's causing people to completely miss the bigger picture, it's an extraordinary level of political forgetfulness.

Remainers flocking to support the Lib-Dems seem to have completely forgotten* all of the Lib-Dem lies, and their red-handed culpability in laying the groundwork for Brexit by helping the Tories wantonly trash our living standards for five devastating years.

It's just four years since the Coalition ended, yet huge numbers of people have apparently already forgotten how appallingly the Lib-Dems behaved, and we're somehow back to trusting them again, despite all their betrayals, despite their austerity-collusion, despite the fact that their entirely unrepentant leader Vince Cable wilfully served as George Osborne's austerity hatchet man at the treasury for five years, and despite the fact he defrauded the UK taxpayer of hundreds of millions by selling off the Royal Mail property portfolio at a fraction of its true value.

If people can't even remember four years ago, what hope is there of them remembering how the very same financial sector that's scarpering with £1 trillion in assets today were the beneficiaries of £1 trillion in bailouts 11 years ago?

So what are the lessons here? 

• Brexit is a chaotic and ongoing economic disaster.

• There's nothing patriotic about supporting the diminishment of your own nation.

• Capitalism has no national loyalties, even to the extent of scarpering just a decade after being lavishly bailed out at the public expense.

• People are apparently so forgetful the bankers' bailouts are ancient history to them, and they're even back to trusting the Lib-Dems 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.

OR

* = Well, either they've forgotten, or they were actually perfectly fine with ruinous austerity fanaticism all along because they were socially and economically insulated from it. So they've either somehow forgotten it all in the space of four years, or they're a bunch of horrible "I'm alright Jack" wankers who simply didn't mind austerity malice at all because the dreadful consequences always fell on other people, meaning they're exactly the kind of insufferably aloof and uncaring metropolitan elitists their opponents always claimed that they were.