The UK economy has been thrown into the worst crisis since 1709, following hot on the heels of the 2008 financial sector insolvency meltdown, and the decade of wanton economy-stagnating Tory austerity ruination that followed it.
Under these circumstances it's the responsibility of the opposition to come up with bold progressive solutions to aid the economic recovery and to protect the most vulnerable and exploited people in society for being lumbered with the costs.
But instead, Labour's new shadow housing minister Thangam Debbonaire has come up with a truly awful proposal.
Instead of demanding radical action to cancel rent arrears and clamp down on the exploitative private rental market, Labour have actually proposed a policy of forcing private renters to pay back their coronavirus rent arrears over two years.
If the coronavirus crisis lasts for six months, a two year repayment schedule would mean an additional 25% on top of private rents that are already inflated to absolutely ludicrous levels, during a period of mass unemployment to boot!
One of the very few potential benefits of an economic crisis for ordinary people is the prospect of deflation in housing costs, but Labour insist on siding with the landlords to ensure that they get their rent arrears by lumbering the full cost onto their tenants.
Let's not forget that people haven't just stopped going to work because they wanted to, they were forced to by the government. A government that then implemented an absolute bodge-job of workers' support measures full of holes and arbitrary cut-offs, purely because of their ideological opposition to implementing emergency Basic Income measures.
Thus millions of the most vulnerable workers have been left without income for a significant period, through no fault of their own, but instead of siding with them, Labour is insisting that they must pay the entire cost of their rent arrears themselves. And to top it off they're pretending that this policy of prioritising landlords' profits above ordinary people's living standards constitutes "help"!
Even if we ignore the plight of individuals who face being loaded down with housing debts that they simply can't afford to pay, there's quite clearly a macroeconomic cost to making the poor pay for the crisis in this way.
In order to find an extra 25% in rent over a two year period, huge numbers of people would have to pay off these debts by spending all of what would have been their disposable income (which is what people have left after essentials like rent, utility bills, childcare, and food).
This means no trips to bars, restaurants, theatres, pool halls, cinemas ... no days out, no saving towards setting up their own businesses, because the exploitative landlord class must have their extra monthly pint of blood to ensure that the coronavirus crisis costs them absolutely nothing.
The workers must pay so that the idle retain their privileges is an economic policy that will lead to reduced demand in the economy, a slower recovery, and fewer jobs.
In the depths of an economic downturn the last thing needed by people who run real businesses (those who do real economic activity rather than just rentier parasitism) is even fewer customers, because their potential customers are spending their entire disposable income servicing debts to the idle rentier class, rather than spending it on real economic activity.
Instead of facing the issue head on and saying that it's completely unfair to force people to repay debts that were accrued through no fault of their own, that it's awful for social welfare to enforce these debts, and extremely bad for the economy too - Labour has somehow decided to revert to the worst kind of 'centrist' slop, positioning themselves a couple of millimetres to the left of whatever horror show they expected the Tories would come up with.
Labour don't want to instantly evict tenants (hooray), but they want to financially cripple them for years, purely for the benefit of private landlords, and they're trying to dress this pathetically weak sauce up as some kind of wonderful favour they're doing too!
If the government says you mustn't work, the idea of loading the full cost of this enforced layoff onto low-income workers and private tenants is absolutely abhorrent.
If the government is going to force people not to work, it has a moral responsibility to ensure that they're not driven into debt, especially when the servicing of these debts will obviously have negative macroeconomic consequences for the post-crisis recovery.
This policy is so incredibly bad it transcends the usual left-right conflict between what's best for society and what's best for capitalism, because it elevates landlordism above both!
Screw what's fair, and screw what's best for the capitalist economy too, because our primary objective is ensuring the idle landlord class get their pint of blood!
What an extraordinary position for Labour to be taking.
And who is this policy meant to appeal to other than private landlords? Would it be enough to convince any private landlords switch allegiance from Tory to Labour? And how many dozens of natural Labour voters will it end up chasing away per "soft Tory" it attracts?
I don't want to blame Keir Starmer for this, but he can't have not foreseen how important the shadow housing brief was going to be, because the coronavirus crisis was well underway when he made these appointments, and yet he still handed it to Thangam Debbonaire anyway.
Just when we needed radical principled proposals from the opposition, we're back to the kind of flaccid, directionless, and shockingly unappealing weak sauce politics that marred the Miliband era, and handed the 2015 General Election to the Tory austerity wreckers.
If Labour can't even bring itself to stand up for ordinary workers who were ordered not to work by the government, because they're too busy prioritising the financial interests of the landlord class, then what the hell is the point of Labour at all?
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The Tory government has continually resorted to the manta that they were simply "following the science" to explain away their decision to ignore the established global pandemic protocol of Test - Trace - Quarantine in favour of letting the virus spread like wildfire through the population for weeks, and abjectly failing to provide proper protective gear to NHS and care home staff, and other essential workers.
However when asked about the scientific advice they've supposedly been relying on to develop this consensus-defying strategy, they've desperately tried to maintain a shroud of secrecy.
They wanted to keep the identities of the scientific advisory group secret, and we found out why when the attendees were leaked. They'd deliberately politicised the science by letting Johnson's henchman Dominic Cummings sit in and influence the meetings, as well as the brother of the dodgy Vote Leave linked data company that's been gobbling up lucrative government contracts ever since Johnson and Cummings got their hands on the nation's public finances.
And now the government has released a heavily redacted version of the SAGE advice.
Scientists at the meeting say that the redacted text is where the experts criticised government policy, with one saying "the impression I'm getting is this government doesn't want any criticism" and another saying "You want trust? You need to be open with people. This isn't open. It is reminiscent of Stalinist Russia".
But the Tories and their minions in the corporate media will keep on saying "following the science" because it is another easily memorable little sound bite like "get Brexit done" for the mindless and the gullible to rote learn and repeat.
It takes a lot more cognitive work to understand that the Tories were actually ignoring the science in favour of corrupted behaviourist pseudo-scientific junk driven by Johnson and Cummings' insistence that protecting capital was more important than saving lives.
And it takes a decent awareness of reality to understand that the concept of just "get Brexit done" was always utterly misleading, especially given that the Withdrawal Agreement was just the first stage in the process, and the fact that Brexit ramifications will echo down the ages, meaning people will never stop talking about it.
But we live in a facts don't matter society, where huge numbers of people simply believe what they want to believe, without any critical thought or fact checking. So if they find glib pro-government sound bites soothing and easily understandable, that's what they'll believe, despite the very clear evidence that the Tories are literally desperate for the public not to know what the scientific advice actually was.
So even when the actual scientists who the Tories claim to have been listening to say that they think the government is behaving like Stalinist Russia, the Boris Bots and unthinking Tory propaganda drones will continue parroting the lie that they were "following the science" because it's what they want to believe to be true.
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A hyper-partisan Tory diatribe is doing the rounds on social media, with many of the iterations purporting to be from the actress and comedian Jennifer Saunders.
The reality is that the poorly written blame-shifting Tory rant was one of those dire copy n' paste jobs that are always doing the rounds in Tory, far-right, and Brexity circles (like the copy n' paste post pretending that the poster had read the Lisbon Treaty for example).
The actual Jennifer Saunders has been forced to come out and distance herself from this vile Tory rant, but that hasn't stopped the page owners from crying victimhood because they were cornered into deleting the post, and posting yet more pro-Tory propaganda on the Saunders fan page.
It's become clear that hyper-partisan Tories are infecting all kinds of local "for sale" pages, community groups, and fan pages with their disgusting pro-government propaganda, and this obnoxious copy n' paste rant is still doing the rounds in Facebook pages and groups all over the country.
As far as I can see nobody has done a comprehensive critique of this mega-viral copy n' paste nonsense, so I guess it's up to me to go through it point by point:
Anyone who has questions about the government's handling of the crisis is a "crayon eater".
An opening sentence aiming insults at anyone who questions the government suggests that this is going to be a very long way from an impartial appraisal of the facts.
The funny thing about this opening salvo is that someone has actually corrected the grammatical errors that appeared in the now deleted version from Fake-Jennifer, but they somehow decided not to correct any of the provable lies, deceptions, and displays of grotesque political illiteracy in the rest of the statement!
This is a lie. Plain and simple. It's a complete misrepresentation of how NHS procurement works.
In 2018 the Tory government set up a government-run company called NHS Supply Chain to manage NHS supplies, with the Tory health secretary Matt Hancock controlling the shares, meaning the government does deal with logistics for the NHS.
The Tories restructured the NHS supply chains to put the health secretary in ultimate charge, but the hyper-partisan copy n' paste Tory liars definitely don't want you to know that.
Furthermore the Tories repeatedly ignored warnings that NHS stockpiles were woefully inadequate. Jeremy Hunt ignored the warnings after Operation Cygnus in 2016, and Hancock ignored the warningsover inadequate PPE again in 2019.
It's difficult to express the level of contempt you should feel towards someone claiming to "respect" NHS doctors and nurses, whilst simultaneously seeking to deflect blame away from their beloved Tories, and onto the NHS.
Operation Cygnus took place in 2016, not "two years ago", and as already mentioned, the NHS actually said that they were unprepared for a respiratory pandemic, with particular concerns about the hopeless lack of protective gear, plus insufficient intensive care beds and respirators.
The Tories were still busy inflicting their austerity cuts to the NHS, and further reducing bed capacity, so the appeals for more PPE fell on deaf ears. The claim that the Operation Cygnus report included the quotes "we can flex" and "we are OK" is frankly absurd, as anyone who has ever set eyes on an internal bureaucratic report before can attest.
The Brexit bit is absolutely confounding. It's ridiculously obvious that four years of Brexit chaos, stemming from the fact the Brexiteers never even had a plan for how to actually do it, means government has been utterly distracted on all the Brexit issues.
The idea that the NHS said "we are OK" is bizarre enough, but "we are OK because ... Brexit" is absolute ridiculousness.
Questioning whether the NHS Supply Chain company which is ultimately controlled by Matt Hancock even understand that ships take time to travel from China is being posited as a defence of the government!
Then there's a criticism of globalisation. Why oh why didn't we prioritise UK-based manufacturers? Well because if any government had attempted to do that then the Tories and their minions in the right-wing propaganda rags would have screeched "protectionism", "communism", "Marxism" at them, just like they did with Labour's modest proposals to renationalise rail, water, and the national grid.
You see running things in the national interest is absolutely forbidden by the Tory ideology, if there's the remotest chance of it interfering with the profiteering of capitalists.
And now to make excuses for this grotesque capitalism above the national interest Tory ideology, the Tory tribalists are making out that NHS managers are responsible for the neoliberal globalisation agenda, not the politicians who made the prioritisation of local suppliers illegal!
As a result of four decades of neoliberal pro-privatisation politics, mainly pushed by the Tories, the majority of care homes are now operated by profit-seeking private companies, therefore the Tories are absolved of blame!
The idea that the government should just let care home residents die in a pandemic because the care home is privately operated is quite frankly disgusting.
OK, if the care homes couldn't cope with their responsibilities during the crisis and needed bailing out at the public expense, lets have the debate about renationalisation of care services after the crisis is over, but the government's first priority in this pandemic should obviously be to prevent people from dying, wherever they happen to be.
It doesn't matter how many times you write MANAGERS in capital letters, the fact remains that the secretary of state Matt Hancock has ultimate responsibility.
And look, it's not just the NHS to blame for the Tory failings either, it's journalists and ordinary members of the public too (who the copy n' paste Tory propaganda brigade quite obviously regard with absolute contempt).
Anyone with any sense can see that the corporate media are crap, not because they criticise the Tories, but because they continually allow them to play politics on easy mode, whilst continually attacking the opposition, and even outright faking scandals about them.
As for ordinary members of the public expressing their opinions, you hardly had to be a trained virologist or epidemiologist to figure out that just letting the virus spread exponentially through the population for weeks instead of following the established WHO protocol (test, trace, isolate) was a very poor strategy in the crucial early stages.
That's why South Korea - who tested and contact traced from the beginning - has a total of 243 deaths, and the UK has 20,000+ according to the official statistics, and almost certainly double that when all the care home and community deaths are finally counted.
"The government has probably made some mistakes" is some hell of an under-estimate in regards to a crisis that's taken tens of thousands of lives, followed by rather a lot of words to argue that anyone who dares to discuss what these "probable mistakes" might be, deserves to be dead.
Ah yes, "let's get through this and beat this together" by ... erm ... copy n' pasting incredibly divisive, hyper-partisan Tory screeds full of outright lies, blame-shifting, Trumpian rhetoric, ALL CAPS SHOUTING, and a load of insults and sneering condescension towards ordinary members of the public who dare to ever engage their critical thinking skills.
The worst thing about fake-Jennifer and all the other Tory partisans sharing this outrageous rubbish is that they're probably stupid enough to believe that propagating such egregious blame-shifting lies is good for the country, because they're incapable of separating the interests of Boris Johnson and his cabinet of hard-right thugs, from the interests of the nation as a whole (which are obviously best served by not having a lazy, incompetent, elitist liar like Johnson running the show).
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
The scandal over Dominic Cummings attending the scientific advisory group meetings revolves around the concept of independent expert advice.
The problem of course is that embedding a very senior government adviser into the scientific advisory group absolutely trashes any claim that the advice they're giving to government is independent from government.
Having a senior member of the government in the meeting changes the entire dynamic, making it much less likely that the scientists will openly criticise or condemn government policy when they think it's wrong.
Everyone knows that people are less likely to speak up freely about institutional problems and mistakes if one of the bosses is in the room, especially when the boss has got a very recent track record of ideologically purging dozens of people who dared to stand up to him, like Cummings did in the Tory mass expulsion in September.
It's beyond obvious that if the scientific advice is to be considered independent, senior government figures should not be embedded in the scientific advisory group.
The official government line is that Cummings was only there to observe, ask questions, and act as an interface between the scientists and 10 Downing Street, which is bad enough for the aforementioned reasons, but former Tory Chancellor George Osborne has openly admitted the actual truth in a remarkable Tweet.
It's absolutely unmistakable that Osborne is admitting that the purpose of embedding Cummings in the scientific advisory group was to politicise the science.
In any kind of functional democracy the scientists would deliver their advice to the government, and then the government would use that advice as the basis for the political decisions they make.
The scientists propose certain measures, then the government combines this scientific advice with the advice they're receiving from their economic advisers to make the political decision whether the suggested measures are justifiable.
Deliberately infecting the scientific advisory group with the politics is clearly the wrong way to go, and one of the main reasons we're now in such a terrible mess, with the highest death rate in Europe, and one of the largest death tolls in the entire world.
The concept of allowing senior government spin doctors to interfere with the scientific or expert advice is an incredibly dangerous one, but George Osborne has come out and openly admitted that this was exactly what the government was doing by embedding Cummings in the scientific advisory group.
The most infuriating thing about this is the absolute non-reaction of people who should be horrified about it.
Recall how every criticism of the government's lamentable inaction in the crucial early stages of the Covid-19 crisis was met with the faux-outrage moralising of "how very dare you politicise this crisis!"
Anyone who has dared to point out how a decade of wanton Tory austerity destruction severely damaged our national ability to respond effectively to the crisis has witnessed the "don't politicise" howling reaching absolute fever pitch.
But then the architect of this austerity ruination comes out and admits that the Tory government deliberately politicised the science, and the "don't politicise" mob say nothing.
Funny isn't it, how their vehement objections to "politicisation" only come into play when people are using facts and evidence to criticise the Tory government, but when a very senior Tory-establishment figure openly admits that the Tory government deliberately politicised the crisis, they have absolutely nothing to say about it whatever!
Almost as if these "don't politicise" screechers are a bunch of absolute hypocrites driven purely by fealty to their Tory lords and masters isn't it?
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The mainstream media non-reaction to the Labour Leak scandal, and the ongoing lack of suspensions within the party are extraordinary in their own right.
What the leaks revealed was a bunch of horrific right-wing wreckers embedded within the Labour Party deliberately trying to lose elections, misallocating party funds, engaging in racist and misogynistic abuse against their party colleagues, and endlessly slagging off their own party's leader, policies, and supporters.
But a little thought experiment puts this scandal, and the almost complete non-reaction to it into a clearer perspective.
If leaked WhatsApp chats revealed that several players on a Premier League football team had been conspiring to deliberately lose crucial games in a misguided attempt to drive out their manager, all hell would break loose.
Especially if the players were also caught out spewing racist abuse at their own black team mates, deliberately undermining their own team's anti-racism initiatives, and repeatedly deriding their own team's fans with mental health slurs.
You could bet every penny you've got on these players being immediately suspended, coverage of the story dominating the newspaper front and back pages for weeks, the regulatory authorities getting involved, and several of the worst perpetrators ending up in jail and never playing professional football again in their lives.
But just imagine if the club decided not to suspend a single one of the players.
How do you imagine the club's fans would react if the team just carried on like nothing had happened?
And do you really think the players' mates in the media would be composing articles portraying the cheating racist scunners as the "poor innocent victims of a terrible invasion of privacy" (despite the fact that they only got caught because one of the hypothetical players had been stupid enough to upload the entire WhatsApp chat history onto the club's computer system!).
But we've seen articles from the Guardian to the Telegraph portraying these bigotry-dripping right-wing saboteurs as the poor innocent victims, and whoever blew the whistle by leaking the report as the dreadful horrible monster of the situation.
In reality we don't even need to imagine how football would react to a scandal like this, because we've got plenty of evidence of how the football community reacts to cheating, disrespect, and racism.
When the former Huddersfield, West Brom, and Notts County player Delroy Facey was caught match fixing he was jailed for two and a half years.
Two England managers have been forced out of their jobs, Glenn Hoddle over his bizarre ableist tirade accusing disabled people of being at fault for their own conditions because of "karma" and Sam Allardyce was removed after one solitary game for financial impropriety.
When former West Brom and Manchester United manager Ron Atkinson was recorded saying that a black footballer was a "lazy, thick N-word" he was cancelled. Despite being one of the pioneering managers who brought black players into his teams in the 1970s and '80s, he clearly stepped way over the line with this racial slur and lost his commentary and football columnist jobs over it.
Just think about how many times football managers and players have been sanctioned and fined for "bringing the game into disrepute", and how establishment politicians have been allowed to get away with absolutely egregious lies, expenses scamming, and horrific abuse of each other and random members of the public.
Just think about the vitriol that a whole host of football players have faced over charges of "going down to easily", even though the referees have shown time and again that they simply don't award free kicks unless players make a big show of falling over at the point of contact.
People who fall over too easily on a sports field get more public derision than politicians who sabotage elections and spew racist, misogynistic, and ableist abuse!
The establishment political class get in comparison to footballers is extraordinary:
Consider Tony Blair's lies that led us into the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the hundreds of thousands who died as a consequence, and how he's still treated as some kind of beloved political oracle by the press, instead of the lying pariah he should be.
Consider David Cameron hiding behind parliamentary privilege like a coward to spew libellous abuse at a random Muslim guy, purely in order to falsely portray Labour's Sadiq Khan as a terrorist sympathiser.
Consider Theresa May's sickeningly racist "Hostile Environment" legislation, and how nobody in the political establishment class has faced any real consequences for the systematic abuse of black British citizens, to the extent of actually deporting scores of UK citizens.
Consider the fact that 88% of Tory Facebook ads were shown to be lies during the 2019 General Election, and absolutely nothing was done about it.
And consider the ludicrous non-reaction to the racism, mental health slurs, delaying of antisemitism investigations, and deliberate electoral sabotage carried out by the Labour right-wingers that was exposed in the Labour Leaks.
It turns out that the United Kingdom is a country with absurd priorities, where the media and regulatory authorities hold footballers, football managers, and football commentators to a vastly higher standard of conduct than the establishment politicians who actually rule over our lives!
We've just become so accustomed to the political establishment lying, and cheating, and scamming their way through their careers that we accept it as a normal part of the job.
But to make matters worse, when one politician showed up who eschewed the lying, and scheming, and self-interested scamming, the mainstream media and the rest of the political class turned on him, continually portrayed him as some kind of repulsive extremist monster, and even deliberately sabotaged his party from within to prevent him from becoming Prime Minister.
Even if it had been players from a football club you don't even like, you'd want them disciplined for bringing the game into disrepute if they'd behaved like the right-wing Labour saboteurs, but somehow, because it's happened in politics rather than football, most of the nation has turned a complete blind eye to it.
And this extraordinary non-reaction provokes the question of how politics can ever be cleaned up if establishment politicians can get away with the kind of deliberate sabotage and rampant bigotry that would result in footballers, or anyone else in any other job, getting sacked, and probably jailed if they did the same.
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We know from Boris Johnson's utterly demented "superman of capitalism" speech on February 4th that the eugenicist idea of letting masses of people die in order to "save capitalism" was an idea that had a lot of traction in Tory circles.
If this eugenicist "let them die to save capitalism" mentality wasn't absolutely commonplace in the Tory ranks, then surely someone would have stopped Boris Johnson from publicly pledging to defy the international consensus, under the delusion he'd be celebrated as a capitalist superhero for deliberately allowing the virus to spread through the UK population like wildfire.
In the end Tory "take it on the chin" eugenics had to be abandoned when it became obvious that letting the virus spread uncontrolled through the population had been a terrible mistake, making the measures needed to contain it far more economically harmful than the standard pandemic protocol of Test, Contact Trace, Quarantine, that they had been so desperate to avoid in the first place.
Many on the political right regard this abandonment of "take it on the chin" as an error, because they believe that if the virus was left to spread freely through the population killing hundreds of thousands of people and utterly overwhelming the health service, it would be somewhat better for the economy.
They can't pretend that allowing the virus to spread wouldn't result in a lot more deaths, so what they try to do is minimise the importance of Covid-19 deaths with claims like "they would have died anyway", and the semantic trickery of quibbling over "died of Covid-19" and "died with Covid-19" as if the deadly viral infection isn't still a contributing factorno matter if the deceased had any other health conditions.
"They would have died anyway" was always obviously vile right-wing eugenicist bullshit, but a new study provides the evidence that it's a total crock.
A group of academics from the University of Edinburgh, University of Glasgow, and Public Health Scotland have shown that the average number of additional years of life lost for Covid-19 deaths are 13 for males, and 11 for females.
Here's a link to the study: COVID-19 – exploring the implications of long-term condition type and extent of multimorbidity on years of life lost: a modelling study
It's early days in the research of a strain of virus that's only been known about for six months, so a lot more research will come, but what's absolutely clear is that huge numbers of Covid-19 victims were nowhere near 'death's door' as the hard-right eugenicists like to pretend.
Anyone continuing to push the "they were going to die anyway" type narratives to push for lockdown to be lifted needs to come up with evidence-based research to disprove the research showing that it wipes at least a decade off the average victim's life don't they?
Otherwise they're essentially saying that killing tens of thousands of people over a decade early is what they consider "a price worth paying" to get their beloved capitalist profits flowing again.
According to analysis of the ONS figures, the Financial Times have reported that the real Covid-19 death toll is likely to be over 41,000 by now, meaning almost half a million years of life lost already if the Scottish lefe expectancy study findings are correct.
And if government concedes to the hard-right eugenics brigade and lifts the coronavirus measures before proper Test and Trace measures are in place, hundreds of thousands more years of life will be erased, potentially from your own elderly relatives.
But that's the thing with the hard-right. Stuff like human life, public health, long-term economic sustainability, the environment, fairness, and basic human decency are continually thrown to the wayside, because capitalist profiteering is their ultimate and overriding objective.
And if this capitalist profiteering means lopping a decade or more off your gran's life, they absolutely won't hesitate. All they'll do is continue to lie that "she was going to die anyway".
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.
Somebody has been stealing the identity of NHS staff in order to set up fake Twitter accounts to sow public confusion and support the government narrative of the day, whatever it happens to be.
These fake NHS worker accounts began by pushing the pseudo-scientific "herd immunity" strategy before switching purpose to begin pushing for the easing of coronavirus restrictions - which will obviously lead to another wave of deaths if it's done before the government has developed the capacity to carry out mass testing and contact tracing.
The "NHS Susan" account was one of them, which posed as a pro-EU, disabled, trans, junior doctor who was pushing a #BanTheClap campaign to stop people clapping for the NHS on Thursdays.
The intention was clearly to sow confusion and create a fake veneer of medical approval towards policies and ideas that the vast majority or real NHS staff would strongly object to.
But it was always completely fake because the photograph that was used on the "NHS Susan" account is actually a picture of a Greek nurse called Mia who was featured in an article about the valuable contribution of foreign medical workers in the NHS.
An independent investigator from Far Right Watch has claimed that "NHS Susan" was part of a botnet of at least 128 propaganda accounts, all operated from a single Hootsuite account.
The Hootsuite account is reportedly registered to a single individual, with three others having permission to post, although the exact identities and employment details of these individuals hasn't yet been revealed.
The investigator hasn't released the bot operators' identities yet, but they claim to have contacted the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), asking questions, and offering to share the data they've collected on the propaganda botnet for the purposes of internal investigation, but they've said they've been given the cold shoulder.
You would have thought that at the very minimum the DHSC would have a duty of care towards NHS employees who have had their identities stolen, but apparently nobody there is even remotely interested in investigating what's been going on.
One thing that did happen was that when people started investigating who was behind these bots, the Tory propaganda accounts like "NHS Susan" were instantly killed off.
It seems highly unlikely the mainstream media will pay any attention to this pro-Tory disinformation campaign, just like they ignored the massive orchestrated Tory election fraud on election day 2019, and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and the bizarre antics at the Department of Education when Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings were running the show there.
In the wake of the initial revelations the DHSC has launched an extraordinary counter-campaign replying to every verified Twitter account to have Tweeted about the scandal with a copy n' paste assertion that "these claims are categorically false" and a link to a web page that doesn't actually contradict a single one of the claims.
It's absolutely undeniable that fake accounts like "NHS Susan" were created by somebody, and that they stole the identity of real NHS staff for the profile pictures, so the claim that the story is "categorically false" is blatantly untrue.
Perhaps some of the assertions aren't exactly correct (we'll see soon enough if/when additional data is released), but the kernel of the story, the fake pro-Tory Twitter accounts, is undeniably true because people have got the screenshots, so it's simply a lie to say the whole thing is "categorically false", especially when not a shred of counter-evidence has actually been produced.
A more sensible and less partisan approach from the DHSC would have been to announce an investigation into who was behind the fake NHS accounts, and to categorically condemn the theft of NHS staff members' identities (who, after all, are their own employees).
The fact that the DHSC has gone down the road of blanket denial, whilst offering no condemnation of the identity theft, and providing no counter-evidence whatever to actually undermine the claims does look deeply suspicious.
There will be more revelations about this Tory propaganda botnet later today, hopefully including the exact identities of the individuals who have been operating it.
The account to follow for more information is John O'Connell.
I'm going to give it another try, but it's unlikely that I'll return to writing blog posts as consistently as I used to.
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.
I said from the beginning that I would give the new Labour Party leader a chance, but that I'm no party political tribalist, so no party should ever assume that they're entitled to my vote. They have to earn it through their policies and their actions.
Watching Keir Starmer allow the Times to hide his first editorial as Labour leader behind a paywall is somewhat of a blow given that I was at least hoping, on the basis of his widely reported intelligence, that he would do quite well.
What's especially galling about this paywall move is the fact that the Times is owned and operated by the billionaire propaganda baron Rupert Murdoch, who is clearly no friend of the labour movement.
The two glaring issues that should occur to anybody are that it makes very little sense for a new leader to hide one of their crucial first statements behind a paywall so that huge numbers of people won't even read it, and that it doesn't make a lot of strategic sense to actively drive traffic and new subscribers towards a publication that is staffed by a bunch of right-wing orthodox neoliberals who will viciously tear you down if you ever dare to propose anything even remotely left-wing or socially progressive.
Beyond the issues of who will actually read this, and the wisdom of actually driving traffic and subscriptions towards a publication that will no doubt be attacking you in the very near future, is the appalling optics of it.
If they wanted to reach out across the political divide (which is a sensible thing), it would have been easily possible for Starmer's team to insist that the paywall was lifted for this particular article, so that everyone could read it.
Failing that they could have pitched to other right-leaning publications with the "no paywall" stipulation.
The most important thing from a communications perspective is that people actually access and read what you're saying, and you do that by making it openly available on the Internet, rather than pitching it almost exclusively to few thousand die hard Tories on their ancient dead tree technology.
Just imagine if Corbyn had released a statement on a massively important public health issue, but hidden it behind a paywall on some left-leaning publication.
The 'sensibles' would have been going absolutely crackers over it, and deriding it as another example of uselessness wouldn't they?
Competent political leaders should ensure that their statements are never hidden behind anyone's paywalls as a matter of course, especially on really important public health issues, and the publications that won't go along with it simply don't get the exclusive editorials, and don't get the clicks.
But they didn't do this. They allowed it to be hidden away behind a Murdoch paywall which sends a very clear message, not from Starmer to the public (most of whom won't even have read what he said below the paywall fade out) but from the Murdoch propaganda empire to the public.
"Starmer is our boy. If you want to know what he's saying, then you come through us. We're in control of the narrative. We're in control of what you see and hear. And look, Starmer is wilfully going along with our way of doing things. There's no hope of ever doing things differently."
Why Starmer would go along with this is anyone's guess.
He knows that he's never going to win over the Murdoch propaganda empire. They absolutely despise him, not just for his involvement in chasing down their phone hacking illegality as Director of Public Prosecutions in the early 2010s, but for standing with the striking Murdoch empire print workers in Wapping, back in the 1980s.
Starmer is supposed to be an intelligent player, but within a day of becoming leader his optics are absolutely hopeless. He's hiding his statements behind paywalls instead of hosting them on open platforms, and he's willing to allow himself to be presented as a Murdoch stooge, even though he knows perfectly well that the Murdoch hacks will never ever accept him!
What on earth is going on? And who approved this hopeless idiocy?
Footnote: You may have noticed that I stopped producing blog posts for several months. The reason is that Facebook has changed their algorithm to make links to my site almost invisible. Even when literally thousands of people share the link, barely anyone actually sees the shares or follows the links. It feels like wasted effort producing articles that virtually nobody reads, when I can still produce infographics and informative posts that are seen by hundreds of thousands.
I'm going to give it another try, but it's unlikely that I'll return to writing blog posts as consistently as I used to.
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.
