After nine years of deliberate Tory vandalism the UK education system is in absolute chaos, but Labour have a fantastic proposal to reverse this damage and make the British education system fit for purpose again.
Under Jeremy Corbyn Labour have developed some fantastic policies, such as publicly owned not-for-profit rail, national grid, water supply and Royal Mail, a National Investment Bank like Norway's Sovereign Wealth Fund, decentralisation of political and economic power, restoration of the NHS, investment economics instead of austerity fanaticism, and the long-overdue closure of the depraved Tory disability denial system.
But the shining jewel in Labour's policy proposals is the establishment of a National Education Service to provide quality education, for free, to all who require it.
It's a fantastic idea because access to a good education is a right, and an obvious benefit to all of society. And the Tories are horrifyingly wrong to have treated education as a commodity to be traded for profit by the rich.
The Tory damage
The damage the Tories have done to our education system over the last nine years will echo down the generations in the form of squandered opportunities, misallocated resources, wasted potential, and unpayable debts.
From the roots of the education to the branches Tory education policy has been a disaster. Here's just some of the detail.
- The Tory fixation with austerity dogma has had its most damaging effect on the education system in adult education, which has suffered an astounding 45% funding cut since 2010. It should be stark-staringly obvious that a well-funded and easily accessible adult education and retraining system should be a vital component in an ever increasingly volatile jobs market, but the Tories have cut it to shreds.
National Education Service
Labour's concept of an integrated National Education Service to provide quality education from cradle to grave is absolutely brilliant, and could revolutionise education in the same way that the introduction of the NHS in 1948 revolutionised our health system and improved our nation's health.
Stop the profiteering
The right-wing idea that education is a commodity to be traded by the rich is an affront to basic common sense.
The primary purpose of an education system should be to provide the best standard of education, not to extract quick profits out of the system.
It's just absurd short-term thinking to think about the education system as a primary source of profit (via profiteering academy chains, dodgy no-bid supply contracts, rip-off student debt repayments ...) rather than a crucial component of future economic prosperity.
The better educated we are as a nation, the more economic potential we have, and the more cash that gets siphoned away in bloated executive salaries and private profits, the less is left to actually spend on the principal task of providing a quality education.
The establishment of a National Education Service would squeeze out the profiteers and reorientate our schools, colleges, universities, and adult education facilities back towards what always should have remained the primary objective: providing the best possible education.
Workforce flexibility
Perhaps the most obvious area where the National Education Service would be an advantage would be the provision of adult education and retraining.
Instead of using draconian sanctions to hound people into finding work (that often simply doesn't exist), referrals to the National Education Service for retraining would clearly be an awful lot more effective.
Someone who loses their job in their 50s doesn't need hounding and abusing until they find work, what they probably need is a skills upgrade, from computer literacy to new skillsets entirely, and a National Education Service that provided these courses free of charge to anyone who needs them would be an obvious economic benefit to the nation in the long-term.
Education for all
One of the most commonplace right-wing whinges goes along the line of "why should I pay for other people's education opportunities when I didn't get a good education myself".
This unbelievably selfish but incredibly commonplace whinge would be eliminated by the introduction of a National Education Service providing access to free education for all.
If everyone is entitled to free education and training, then the only ones left whinging would be those who don't want to benefit. "why should I pay for other people's education opportunities when I don't want to be educated myself" doesn't have quite the same impact does it?
Policy-based debate
The proposal of a National Education Service is a fantastic policy, but few people know about it because the Tories and their cheerleaders in the mainstream media know that Labour and the left would win hands down when it comes to policy because the general public strongly support most of it (see image).
That's why politics is continually debased to such an extent with an endless barrage of trivial nonsense and outright smears.
Corbyn didn't bow properly. Corbyn didn't sing the national anthem. Corbyn doesn't dress in expensive Saville Row suits so he's unfit to be Prime Minister. Jeremy Corbyn's an IRA supporter (because he met members of Sinn Féin and the Ulster Unionists to appeal for a peaceful resolution to the conflict). Corbyn went to Morecambe. Corbyn is a Czech spy. Corbyn supporters are all Stalinists and Trotskyites. Let's focus on anti-Semitism in Labour all the time (when there are way more anti-Semites in the Tory ranks). Corbyn supported Hitler during WWII (even though he wasn't even born). Corbyn is a Russian stooge (even though the Tories are the ones raking in £millions from Russian oligarchs and Putin cronies). Corbyn muttered "stupid woman" (or was it "stupid people"? let's debate this for several days!)
The barrage of nonsense and smears is as endless as it is deliberate.
They'd much rather we expend our time and effort defending Corbyn, and Labour, and the left in general from this constant bombardment of gibberish, than spending it discussing and explaining Labour's policies.
And the concept of a cradle to grave National Education Service is one of the best Labour policies of all. Maybe let's talk about that for a while, rather than continually fixating on the latest faux outrage or manufactured smear?
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In 2014 Tory Home Secretary Theresa May pushed through the outrageous "Immigration Act" which was intended to create a "Hostile Environment" for anyone without the certification to prove that they had a right to live in Britain.
Toty Hostile Environment was eventually used to deny housing, employment, banking services, social security, and even life-saving medical treatment to Black british citizens of the Windrush generation.
Scores of black British citizens were even deported under Theresa May's "deport first, hear appeals later" principle, with several actually dying in exile overseas, thousands of miles away from their families and friends, and the land that they called home.
In March 2019 this despicable legislation was declared unlawful in a British court of law for the racist way it was used to discriminate against black Brits.
Yet on the newly instituted Windrush Day, Theresa May set about audaciously whitewashing her demonstrable track record of racist discrimination against black Brits, and the ever-duplicitous Lib-Dems are distancing themselves from the policy that they helped vote through, and even pretending that they're long-standing opponents of hostile Tory immigration policies!
Yes, Theresa May bears ultimate responsibility for the Hostile Environment, (and for making it even worse in 2016), but the Lib-Dems absolutely loved it at the time, in fact one of their MPs Mark Hunter actually served as one of the "tellers for the ayes" in the parliamentary vote!
Check Hansard if you don't believe me.
Former Lib-Dem leader Tim Farron voted in favour of Theresa May's unlawfully racist Hostile Environment.
Current Lib-Dem leader Vince Cabe voted in favour of Theresa May's unlawfully racist Hostile Environment.
Only 3 of the then 57 Lib-Dem MPs listened to their consciences and defied the Lib-Dem party whip to vote against Theresa May's unlawfully racist Hostile Environment.
But taking the Golden Biscuit prize for duplicitous posturing is current Lib-Dem leadership candidate Ed Davey who published a Windrush Day article pinning the blame entirely on the Tories, and whitewashing the fact that he himself voted in favour of Tory hostile immigration legislation in 2014!
It just goes to show how utterly degraded the standard of political discourse has become that we're surrounded by duplicitous liars on all sides, from the lying Brextremists who dragged us into absolute chaos via a tide of shockingly dishonest propaganda on one side, to the entirely unapologetic Lib-Dems on the other who whitewash their crimes against the British people (Hostile Environment, austerity fanaticism, wage repression, ruinous public service cuts, welfare vandalism, erosion of Legal Aid and the judicial system, shockingly illiberal secret courts, unpayable student debts, the slowest economic recovery in Centuries, and so much more) rather than fessing up and apologising to the nation for what they did.
And the worst thing of all is the tendency of these duplicitous liars to climb up onto their moral high horses and sneer down at those of us who refuse to buy into their despicable lies, or believe their Orwellian whitewashing of their utterly malicious track records.
According to them, the people who actively voted in favour of the Tory hostile environment they're now carping about from the sidelines, they're the reputable social progressives, and us on the left who opposed hostile environment all along are the partisan political militants!
I'm tempted to say you couldn't make it up, but the ever-duplicitous Lib-Dems already have.
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In March 2019 Theresa May's despicable 2014 Hostile Environment legislation was declared unlawful in a British court of law for the racist way it was used to discriminate against Windrush Brits.
This unspeakably vile piece of legislation was used to deny housing, employment, banking services, social security, and even life-saving medical treatment to black British citizens.
Scores of black Brits were even deported overseas under May's unbelievably outrageous "deport now and hear appeal later" principle. Several of these British deportees actually died in exile overseas.
When the Windrush scandal finally broke in 2018 May outright refused to take responsibility for the Hostile Environment rules she pushed through as Home Secretary, instead having Amber Rudd take the fall for it (before being rapidly bounced back into government to take over the DWP just a few months later).
Today Theresa May released a stomach-churningly hypocritical video praising the Windrush generation, banging on about Windrush day, and announcing a Windrush statue to be erected in Waterloo Station.
Theresa May and every single one of the MPs who voted in favour of her despicable Hostile Environment should never have the audacity to even utter the word "Windrush" unless it forms part of a profuse apology for their role in creating such a shameful national scandal.
But instead Theresa May and numerous others in the Westminster establishment class are using Windrush Day to pat themselves on the back, and to whitewash the pivotal roles they played in causing so much suffering.
Perhaps the only people rivalling Theresa May for audacity are the Lib-Dems who released a Windrush Day Tweet claiming that they would "Redouble [their] efforts to challenge the hostile immigration policies which created the Windrush Scandal".
Anyone reading Tweet this without knowing what a bunch of duplicitous tosspots the Lib-Dems are would probably imagine that May's Hostile Environment was passed despite vehement Lib-Dem objections.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
In reality the current Lib-Dem leader Vince Cable voted in favour of it, his predecessor Tim Farron voted in favour of it, the new Lib-Dem leadership candidate Ed Davey voted in favour of it, and the other leadership candidate Jo Swinson joined the Labour right-wingers in abstaining in order to help it glide through parliament virtually unopposed.
Of the 57 Lib-Dem MPs at the time, just 3 had the decency to defy the party whip and vote against it (all of them departed from parliament now).
In fact the Lib-Dems were so keen on Theresa May's hostile environment that their MP Mark Hunter acted as one of the tellers for the "Aye" lobby!
The SNP, Plaid Cymru, and the Greens did themselves proud by opposing this disgusting legislation from the beginning.
Labour, which was still in catastrophic late-stage Blairism mode, badly let themselves down by whipping their MPs to abstain so the legislation could pass without substantial opposition, with just six Labour MPs defying the whip to vote against it. This honourable six include Jeremy Corbyn (now party leader), Diane Abbott (now shadow Home Secretary) and John McDonnell (now Shadow Chancellor).
The fact that three of the honourable six now occupy the top three jobs demonstrate that Labour have moved on from this despicable episode in their history, but the party should be deeply ashamed that they abandoned the principles of social justice like this, and be vigilant of ever going back to the dark days of Blairites, Tory enabling abstentions, and horrifying anti-immigrant mugs.
The Tories and Lib-Dems have no such excuses. The Tories elevated the architect of this disgusting and unlawful legislation to lead their party, and the Lib-Dems elevated Vince Cable, who actively voted it through, as leader of their party.
Neither of these parties has shown an appropriate level of contrition for their roles in this institutional racism scandal, and now they're both pathetically rewriting history to pretend that they ever gave a shit about the Windrush Brits they actively legislated to discriminate against.
As a white British person I'm fucking outraged at the audacity of this Orwellian revisionism from Theresa May, the Tories, and their Lib-Dem enablers, and I can only try to imagine how black British citizens must feel to see these audacious bastards rewriting history to whitewash away their demonstrable track record of supporting racism.
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The majority of our political class live in bubbles of wealth, power, and privilege that most of us could only imagine, swanning around from one lavish and oh-so-important event to another barely ever having to interact with ordinary people (or the lower orders as they tend to think of us).
Last night the Tory establishment class gathered for a speech by Tory Chancellor Philip Hammond at Mansion House, but this time some of the lower orders managed to get in and start making a fuss about climate change (you know, unrestrained capitalism is wrecking the planet, we've got to do something about it before it's too late ... that kind of entirely justifiable point).
The Tory establishment class are used to having things their own way, as they've been for centuries, so they don't take kindly to interruptions, especially when they're busy giving important self-congratulatory speeches about how wonderfully they've been doing overseeing the slowest economic recovery in centuries, the worst period of collapsing workers' wages on record, soaring rates of poverty, collapsing public services, and wanton vandalism of the social safety net.
The impertinence of these Tory safe space-invading protesters was all too much for the Tory MP Mark Field, who furiously leapt from his seat grabbed one of the protesters, violently shoved her against a pillar, and then dragged her away by the back of the neck.
The footage is shocking, and it certainly puts a lot of the right-wing faux outrage over political violence and free speech into clear contrast:
Lobbing milkshake on Nigel Farage generated torrents of 'this terrorism is the death of democracy' outrage.
A crap joke by a comedian was dressed up as 'incitement to political violence'.
And every time a right-wing hate preacher gets themselves kicked off a social media platform for breaking the community standards it's hailed as another example of 'the death of free speech'.
But when a powerful Tory MP and government minister literally attacks a woman and drags her out of the room for daring to interrupt when her Tory 'lords and masters' were speaking, and suddenly it's 'he did the right thing' and 'she was asking for it'!
The outrage only ever goes one way, until the violence and repression of dissent comes from their side, they're suddenly making excuses for it!
But the worst thing of all isn't Mark Field's display of elitist violence against political dissent, nor is it the naked hypocrisy of right-wing faux outrage about violence and free speech, it's the fact that nobody else in the entire room full of Tory toffs sought to intervene, or to even tell him to stop.
As far as the room was concerned this violent and repressive response to political dissent wasn't even vaguely shocking.
It's bad enough seeing ugly bile-spewing right-wing Twitter trolls banging on about how the protester got what she deserved, but the absolute non-reaction of the rest of the Tory toffs in the room as one of their own behaved in this atrocious manner tells you that they have the same mindset as the Tory Twitter trolls.
Of course they're far too refined to overtly blabber it out on Twitter in the hope of winding up social liberals and lefties, but their silence and non-reaction speaks louder than words.
These people weren't outraged because they simply saw nothing to be outraged about.
And these arrogant elitist toffs are the people we've let rule over us for the last nine years.
No wonder the country is in such an absolute mess.
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One of the entries in the fake Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is the made up term "exulansis" which is described as "the tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it".
When it comes to British politics this feeling is particularly apt, given the glaring disconnect between what the mainstream media focus on, and what millions of us experience in our daily lives.
The IPPR estimate that 130,000 British citizens have been driven into early graves as a result of Tory austerity cuts to health and social care services, and the government's own figures admit that literally thousands of disabled people have dies within weeks of being declared "fit for work" by the Tory disability denial system.
Even if these victims had an average of just two loved ones, that's well over a quarter of a million people who have suffered tragic personal loss at the hands of the state. But if you look at the mainstream media output, they barely mention it (the BBC even deliberately buries austerity death figures) in favour of whatever the talk of Westminster bubble is, which is currently the ridiculously undemocratic Tory leadership contest which utterly dominates every single news broadcast and politics show.
Aside from all the deaths, Tory austerity has caused the slowest economic recovery in Centuries and vast amounts of suffering: Soaring food bank dependency, collapsing public services, millions of children growing up in dire poverty despite living in working households, workers trapped in exploitative Zero Hours Contracts and rip-off gig economy jobs. ever more victims of violent crime after the Tories scrapped 21,000+ police and gutted police funding, graduates trapped by vast completely unpayable student loan debts on extortionate inflation+3% repayment terms, the worst sustained collapse in the value of workers' wages since records began, huge NHS waiting lists, especially for mental health services that have been stripped down to the bare bones, millions of sick and disabled people living in fear of the next disability denial assessment aimed at stripping them of their social security payments and forcing them onto the dole queue ...
But all we hear about on every BBC News and politics show is this ridiculous, and brazenly anti-democratic Tory beauty pageant.
Day, after day, after day of the Tory candidates whitewashing their own demonstrable culpability in all of this suffering, and never held to account over their utterly abysmal track record in government (every single one of these men served in Theresa May's cabinet), nor their relentless smears against Jeremy Corbyn.
And this is where the feeling of "exulansis" comes in.
We want someone to represent our feelings; to hold those responsible for our suffering to account for their crimes against us, but the mainstream media class are almost entirely incapable of doing this.
This class of people are almost entirely insulated from the horrors of austerity Britain.
They're on six and seven figure salaries. They have secure homes and comfortable lives. Nobody is snatching food out of their children's mouths or threatening their residency in the UK. They don't rely on the social safety net that the Tories have been vandalising, nor the public services the Tories have driven into the ground. If there's an outrageous queue for the NHS medical service they need, then they can just go private.
The biggest concern or inconvenience that Tory austerity fanaticism has caused them is probably the fact that their bins collection might have been changed from weekly to fortnightly as a result of unprecedented Tory cuts to the local government budget.
And the majority of the politicians these people are supposed to be holding to account are their well-to-do chums with the same comfortable lifestyles and the same privileged backgrounds (wealthy parents, exclusive private schools, Oxbridge, old school ties opening doors to job opportunities us proles could only ever dream of ...).
So when it comes to the ruinous consequences of austerity, mainstream media hacks often come across as visibly bored by it, like it's just the pointless preaching of lefties distracting attention away from the much more important task of regurgitating the latest gossip and groupthink from the Westminster bubble.
Austerity fanaticism barely affects them, so they don't simply care about it, or accept it as an important issue, or recognise the crucial role this disastrous hard-right fanaticism has played in reducing our nation to this shambolic state.
They just see talk of austerity and its dire consequences as an irritating distraction from their beloved Westminster tittle-tattle and the Tory beauty parade they're all so obsessed with right now.
This indifference tells us that the system doesn't care about us. That the people administering the system don't care about us. That the people tasked with holding the system administrators to account don't care about us.
All they care about is the niche concerns of their own exclusive social class, and it definitely shows.
And that's how millions upon millions of us are left feeling "exulansis" at the state of politics, because virtually nobody covering it is even remotely capable of relating to the horrifying real world consequences of the policies enacted by their own social class against people like us that they consider to be beneath them.
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"Centrist" hack Suzanne Moore has written a truly execrable article for the Guardian whining that Jeremy Corbyn hasn't got any women in his inner circle.
The weirdest thing is that Jeremy Corbyn's shadow cabinets have demonstrably been the most gender-balanced in history, with incredible and capable women in key positions, many of whom would never have been given a chance at the top table had the pro-austerity pro-privatisation orthodox neoliberal "centrists" managed to maintain their grip on the party after they pathetically tanked the 2015 General Election.
She's deliberately seeking to downplay and erase the role of capable and intelligent Labour women like Diane Abbott, and Angela Rayner, and Dawn Butler, and Rebecca Long-Bailey, to create the reality-reversed narrative that Corbyn's somehow a misogynist intent on keeping women down, rather than the Labour leader who has actually done the most to lift capable women into positions of responsibility within the party.
It's not difficult to see what the real agenda is, given that the article hearer image is of "centrist" self-publicity merchant Jess Phillips.
After her call for a "centrist" woman like Jess Phillips or Stella Creasy to take over the Labour Party, the author resorts to the most despicable line of the whole incontinent diatribe by referring to the women in Corbyn's cabinet in the most demeaning language with the phrase "a suitable female pet has to be groomed or the revolution may stall".
Suzanne Moore and all of the "centrist" dupes who have shared this noxious diatribe have deliberately invisibalised and demeaned intelligent and capable non-white, and working class, and genuinely left-wing Labour MPs.
And they've done it purely in order to promote their favoured choice of white, centre-right women from extremely privileged backgrounds (Creasy comes from an aristocratic family, and despite her faux working class pretensions Jess Phillips grew up in an incredibly wealthy household).
And what makes referring to Labour women in Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet as if they're just mindless groomed pets on display, rather than strong independent capable women with minds and political views of their own all the worse is that Suzanne Moore and her "centrist" ilk would immediately assume the role of furious language police if it was anyone else (from either the political right or from the left) who was using such demeaning language about women with diferrent political views to their own.
These people are hypocritically spreading this undisguised misogynist contempt because they simply don't want to have, or even acknowledge the existence of black, or left-wing, or working class Labour women at all, because the only women they're interested in acknowledging or being represented by are white wealthy women who are exactly like them.
They're a bunch of arrogant, racist, classist, prigs, but they're so wrapped up in their self-righteous bubbles of "centrist" delusion that they've convinced themselves that speaking about other women in this grotesque and demeaning way is perfectly acceptable, because they actually believe that any woman who serves with Corbyn is fully deserving of all the contempt, and ridicule, and marginalisation, and abuse that they get.
In reality Moore and her ilk are just a couple of steps away from far-right bigots ripping veils off Muslim women and calling them "letterboxes" because these women won't do as they're told, but this type are so self-righteous in their "centrism" that they can't even see what kind of people they've become.
Suzanne Moore should be ashamed of writing this fact-averse and misogynistic diatribe. The Guardian should be ashamed for commissioning and publishing it. And anyone who shared it for any other reason than criticism of it needs to have a good hard look at themselves too.
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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!
- 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?
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.
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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