Our future is in the hands of these maniacs!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'll give just a few examples:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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OR

Lib-Dem Iraq whataboutery is the pinnacle of hypocrisy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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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.

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