Jeremy Hunt's austerity bragging proves he always knew how bad it was

Tory austerity was always a massive con job designed to justify their pre-existing ideological obsession with transferring as much wealth as possible from the majority to the mega-rich minority.

Austerity is a con

The lessons of economic history are absolutely clear. If you want a quick economic recovery then invest in productive areas of the economy (housing, infrastructure, services ...), if you want a slow drawn out recovery go on a wanton ideological slash-fest, and if you want to really stymie the economy then coincide your slash-fest with a deliberate upwards redistribution of wealth from ordinary working people (who spend and create economic demand) to the mega-rich who are far more inclined to stash the additional wealth you hand them in tax haven hideaways.

Jeremy Hunt knows all of this. He knows that Tory austerity resulted in the slowest economic recovery in Centuries; he knows that Tory wage repression policies caused the longest real terms decline in UK workers' wages in decades; he knows that the Tories have spectacularly failed to deliver their promise of eliminating the budget deficit by 2015 (it's still not gone and it's 2019) he knows that unprecedented public service cuts have choked the NHS and severely damaged the education system; he knows that austerity cuts have vandalised the social safety net; he knows that the Tory 30% cut to the police budget has coincided with soaring violent crime; and he knows that austerity dogma has led to the impoverishment of millions, and the deaths of tens of thousands.

He also knows that the living standards collapse that these policies delivered are one of the main causes of the wave of public anger that drove the Brexit vote narrowly over the winning line in the 2016 EU referendum.

So when Jeremy Hunt praises the "genius" of David Cameron and George Osborne for imposing austerity without causing riots on the streets he's not saying that the policy of austerity, wage repression, public service cuts, infrastructure under-investment, and vandalism of the social safety net was "genius", he's saying that convincing the British public to believe in a package of radical hard-right policies that ruined their living standards, at the exact same time as the Tories were showering corporations and the mega-rich with lavish tax cuts and handouts.

The reality is quite different. Cameron and Osborne were hardly geniuses for pulling off such a damaging con on the British public, they just benefited from a shocking lack of opposition as they did it.

Lib-Dem collusion

The Liberal Democrats played a key role by switching from their warnings about the folly of excessive spending cuts before the 2010 General Election to enthusiastically backing every last Tory cut in order to hang onto their six figure ministerial salaries, their chauffeur-driven cars, and their temporary senses of self importance.

Mainstream media

The mainstream media openly colluded with Tory austerity dogma. Hardly surprising from the billionaire-owned propaganda rags like the Daily Mail, S*n, Times, Telegraph, Express, Spectator ... but a catastrophic failure on behalf of the supposedly "impartial" BBC.

Given that the BBC always love to create artificial "balance" by giving equal airtime to science-denial idiots and oil industry lobbyists to "balance" the debate on humanity's ongoing ruination of the environment, they abjectly failed to "balance" the economic debate with at least an equal number of sensible pro-investment voices on every panel to counter the ideologically driven austerity gibberish of the Tories.

Labour right-wingers

The Blairite right-wingers who controlled the shadow treasury under Ed Miliband were perhaps the worst offenders of all. They saw the mainstream media refusal to question austerity madness, and instead of redoubling their efforts to oppose this wanton Tory malice, they folded completely and decided to offer a sickly "austerity-lite" agenda at the 2015 General Election in the pathetic hope of converting a few thousand "soft Tory" voters in marginal constituencies.

What they didn't factor into their calculations was that for every "soft Tory" they won over by pathetically imitating Tory austerity fanaticism, they drove away dozens of natural Labour voters.

Failure of opposition

This abject failure of opposition across Westminster and the mainstream media left the UK in the frankly ridiculous situation where the mainstream media and all three of the Westminster establishment parties were all simultaneously pushing ruinous austerity dogma, while the only sustained opposition was coming from the widely ignored economics academics, the Green Party, the SNP in Scotland, Plaid Cymru in Wales, and a small bunch of bloggers and independent media sites.

The Public

And the public don't get off without criticism either. Even if the political and mainstream media establishment abjectly failed in their duties to hold the Tories to account and offer alternatives to their malicious and destructive agenda, people could still have risen up in protest.

Since 2008 British workers have suffered an unprecedented 5% collapse in the value of their wages, while the French have seen a modest 6% increase in the same period. Who are the ones protesting in the streets every single weekend, and who are the ones who sit at home with their apathetic "keep calm and carry on" attitude in the face of relentless economic persecution by the wealthy policial establishment class?

Labour offering hope again

Now that Labour has moved decisively away from hard-right Tory austerity dogma things are better, but the damage austerity caused, and the Brexit chaos it unleashed can never be undone. Even if we reversed course tomorrow and began actually investing in our economy, and building our future economic potential, we're now 9 years and a catastrophic brexit mess behind where we would have been without austerity fanaticism.

Credit must be given to the small minority of Labour MPs who refused to jump on board the Tory austerity train when Blairites all around them were clamouring to actually drive it.

Credit also must be given to the Greens, SNP, and Plaid Cymru for opposing austerity all the time, even in the face of outright hostility from most of the the pro-austerity mainstream media.

Conclusion

Cameron and Osborne were opportunists to try such a destructive con job on the British people, but they weren't geniuses, they simply benefited from a near complete lack of political opposition, from the Lib-Dems who enabled them, the cowardly right-wing Labour idiots who imitated them instead of vehemently opposing them, the mainstream media who consistently failed to hold them to account for the economic crimes they were committing against the British people, and a frankly apathetic population who actually reelected the party that did this to them not once, but twice!

But at least we know that Hunt is well aware of the fact that austerity was so bad that it should have triggered 'riots in the streets'.

At least we know that the Tories were fully aware of how evil their agenda was at the time, but they did it anyway because their core ideology has always been to serve the interests of the wealthy establishment class (who completely bankroll their party) at the direct expense of everyone else in society, and they knew that they would probably get away with it due to the compliance of the Westminster establishment club, the complicity of the mainstream media hack pack, and the downright apathy of the British public.

 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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Political guide 2019 European parliament elections

This article exists as an accompaniment to the political guide infographic. It's all pretty self-explanatory but it's important to back up some of the assertions with evidence and analysis.

Political position

The Green Party and Labour under Corbyn are Democratic Socialist parties occupying the traditional centre-left position before neoliberalism came along and dragged the entire political spectrum off to the right.

The Tory leadership are hard-right neoliberal being the party that originally injected this toxic strain of economic fanaticism into the UK government when they won the 1979 general election. A significant proportion of Tory backbenchers are far-right rabble rousers, but since the party leadership has not been completely usurped yet, they're still best classified as hard-right neoliberals.

The Lib-Dems and the new CUK squatter party are both "centrist" neoliberal, in that they're not as militant about their neoliberal ideology as the Tories, and often choose to focus on other issues (like Brexit, or social policies) but they also strongly resist any challenge to the established neoliberal orthodoxy, and actively support it if it suits their selfish political purposes.

The SNP and Plaid are both quite mixed political parties held together more by civic nationalism than economic stance. Overall they're more-or-less centre-left and I don't think many of their members would complain too vehemently as being described as social democrats.

Under Gerrard Batten UKIP have turned into a militant hard-right political force, expending far more effort on whipping up anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim hate, rather than detailing real political policies.

Farage's Brexit Party have only just been launched, but going on the fact they've already had two party leaders exposed as outrageous bigots, and Farage's willingness to participate in far-right rabble rousing throughout his political career, it'd take a hefty dose of gullibility to believe they're going to suddenly become centrists or social democrats.

Austerity

The Green Party deserve a lot of credit for being the only explicitly anti-austerity UK-wide political party in 2015, however Labour have learned their lesson from their abject failure to oppose Tory austerity fanaticism that lost them that election, and under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership they've moved to opposing Tory austerity dogma, rather than pathetically imitating it.

SNP and Plaid are both opposed to ruinous Tory austerity fanaticism too.

The Lib-Dems repeatedly try to distance themselves from the devastating Tory austerity fanaticism they enabled between 2010 and 2015, and will tie themselves in cognitive knots trying to pretend that the collapse in living standards these austerity policies caused had nothing to do with the massive upswell in public anger that carried Leave marginally over the winning line in the 2016 EU referendum.

The CUK squatter party are definitely pro-austerity. They've appointed Chris Leslie as their economics spokesperson, and he was one of the key architects of Labour's disastrous "austerity lite" agenda at the 2015 general election. Anna Soubry described the policies of the 2010-2015 austerity years (wage repression, public service cuts, infrastructure under-investment, defunding of local governments, vandalism of the social safety net ...) as "marvellous", and every single one of them either voted in favour of, or cynically abstained on George Osborne's devastating austerity cuts in 2015.

UKIP were explicitly pro-austerity before Batten became leader, but neither they, nor Farage's Brexit Party like to talk about austerity at all, because it's a lot easier to pin the blame for the devastating consequences on immigrants and the EU if you simply ignore the fact that austerity even exists.

Brexit

Theresa May and the Tory leadership are still trying to force their botched thrice-rejected hard-right Withdrawal deal through parliament.

Labour want to create a soft Brexit with Single market and Customs Union access, protected workers' rights, food standards, and environmental laws, and cooperation on science and security. They're also willing to hold a confirmatory referendum, and to consider retention of Free Movement (as demonstrated when they voted in favour of Nick Boles' compromise Brexit in the indicative votes).

The Lib-Dems, CUK, Greens, SNP, and Plaid Cymru are all Brexit-sceptic and they all seem to be prioritising another referendum, which is fine, but there's clearly no guarantee that Remain would win it given that nothing at all has been done since 2016 to clamp down on electoral liars and cheats (with serious punishments like bans from public office and jail time) or to regulate online social media dark ads.

It's fair enough opposing Brexit, I'm highly sceptical about it too, but if your strategy is simply another roll of the dice in a rigged game, you've got to acknowledge the risk of creating an inescapable double-mandate for a ruinous hard-right Brexit.

UKIP and Farage's Brexit Party are both pushing for a militant "no deal" Brexit that would bring economic chaos to the whole of the UK, and massively re-ignite tensions over the Northern Ireland border.

Social issues

When it comes to stuff like gay rights the Tories have moved dramatically from their homophobic Section 28 discrimination in the 1990s, but on disability rights their systematic abuse of disabled people has been condemned as a human rights violation by the United Nations. In any decent and compassionate society this despicable abuse would be considered an national scandal, but the mainstream media and most Brits don't even seem to care that tens of thousands of disabled people have died within weeks of being declared "fit for work" in Tory disability denial assessments.

The Tories also introduced Theresa May's vile Hostile Environment which led to unlawful abuse of black British citizens, including being forced into exile from their own countries.

And anyone supporting the use of British weapons in war crimes committed in Yemen by the homophobic, misogynistic, head-chopping, democracy-crushing, terrorism-spreading, journalist-dismembering Saudi tyrants has no right whatever to pose as any kind of "social liberal".

The Lib-Dems pose as social liberals, but they spent five years in coalition with the Tories vandalising the social safety net, systematically abusing disabled people, and supporting Theresa May's unlawful abuse of the Windrush generation. In fact the Lib-Dems agreed harsher social security sanctions (which mainly affect the mentally ill and the severely under-educated) in return for 5p charges on plastic bags!

Labour and the Greens have been vehemently opposing the systematic Tory abuse of sick and disabled people. The SNP and Plaid also have strong track records when it comes to opposing abusive Tory legislation like Theresa May's Hostile Environment, and the systematic Tory abuse of disabled people.

Not a single one of the CUK squatter MPs voted against Theresa May's hostile Environment. The ex-Tory members of the group actually voted in favour of it! They've also put Mike Gapes (a huge fan of imperialist war-mongering and the Saudi tyrants) in charge of their foreign policy agenda. If you believe in turning places like Iraq and Libya into lawless terrorist breeding zones, and support Saudi war crimes in Yemen, you're no social liberal, even if you pose as social progressives on domestic issues.

UKIP and the Brexit Party are rabble rousers intent on actually whipping up hatred against immigrants and minorities in order to push their far-right agenda. You'd have to be absolutely delusional to think they'd actually stand up for the vulnerable when it comes to social policy issues.

Privatisation

Labour and the Green Party campaign explicitly on policies like bringing the railways, water supply, schools, and hospitals back under public not-for-profit ownership. The vast majority of British people agree with this public ownership stance.

The Tories are privatisation fanatics. Since 2010 they've been busy outright defying public opinion by privatising NHS services, the Royal Mail, literally thousands of schools, and even massive chunks of the police and judicial system (including front line police services, probation, court translation,  forensic science, and prisons).

Between 2010 and 2015 the Lib-Dems actively helped the Tories defy public opinion by privatising hospitals, schools, police services, probation, and prisons. Their leader Vince Cable was even the man the Tories put in charge of flogging off the Royal Mail at significantly below it's real market value!

The SNP have a more mixed approach. They've been in power in the Scottish government since 2007 so they could have done more to reverse privatisation in Scotland, however in areas where they have had the power to block it they have prevented a lot of the Tory privatisation mania that's infested England since 2010. In England 3/4 of secondary schools have been privatised, in Scotland the education system remains in the public sector.

The CUK squatter MPs clearly signalled their pro-privatisation credentials by appointing water privatisation propagandist Angela Smith as their energy, environment, and transport minister, numerous other CUK MPs have bitterly criticised Labour's public ownership plans, and they've just hitched their boat to the right-wing EPP European group, which includes the hard-right Spanish PP and Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia party. Anyone expecting this neoliberal rabble to begin opposing and reversing Tory privatisation mania is clearly not paying any attention to what they're actually saying and doing.

UKIP used to be extremely vocal pro-privatisation fanatics to the point of promoting the full privatisation of the NHS, but they've quit talking about their economic policies these days in favour of immigrant-bashing and Muslim hate-mongering. Anyone imagining that UKIP and Farage's far-right Brexit mob would set about reversing Tory privatisation fanaticism is even more delusional than the CUK squatter fans!

Conclusion

Whatever your views on Brexit, be very careful that you don't end up endorsing a political party with terrible views and policies on other issues.

This is especially important when it comes to austerity fanaticism given that ruinous Tory austerity dogma was the root cause of the wave of public anger that caused the Brexit vote in the first place.

Voting for a pro-austerity political party because they make a big fuss about opposing Brexit is like worrying about your hair falling out and the blood in your piss as you continue wilfully drinking the political arsenic.

 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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12 questions to ask local Tories who turn up on your doorstep pretending to be your friend

As the May 2nd local elections approach many of us will have the uncomfortable experience of Tory canvassers knocking on our doors to pretend to be our friends. 
In this article I'm going to provide 12 questions you can use to blast them off their feet.

1. How much have your party cut the local government budget since 2010?

They will try to bluster and blunder their way around this question because they know the answer is not good for them at all. The Institute for government say that they've cut support for communities and local government by 67% since 2010. 

These ideologically driven Tory cuts are the reason your Council Tax bill is going up, while your local services are worse than they've ever been before.

2. Do you think that there is a link between rising violent crime and the 20,000+ police jobs you Tories have scrapped?

There is obviously a link between the Tories slashing 20,000+ police jobs and the soaring rates of violent crime, but the Tories will try to deny it because to admit it would be extremely damaging.

So instead of admitting the truth they assume that the general public are so thick that we'd actually reject our own common sense understanding of cause and effect, and mindlessly believe the Tory fairy story that slashing the police force back to 1970s levels of per capita policing has had absolutely no effect whatever on rates of serious crime!

3. In 2010 you lot said you'd eliminate the deficit by 2015 but you failed, what is your projection now?

When the Lib-Dems enabled the Tories back into power in 2010 they endlessly promised that their hard-right austerity project would eliminate the budget deficit by 2015. They obviously missed that target by miles because it's mid-2018 and the deficit is still there.

Again the Tory canvasser at your doorstep is likely to try to bluff and bluster their way out of answering the question, because they either don't know, or they know that the answer is awful. Maybe allow them bluster away for a while before you burst their bubble by informing them that the latest projection is 2031, and asking them if they think it's acceptable to take 21 years to achieve what they promised to do in less than 5.

4. Are you aware that the Tory party has a problem with bigotry?

The Tory canvasser on your doorstep will almost certainly try to deflect onto Labour and the charges of anti-Semitism, but you can nip this kind of evasion in the bud by pointing out that YouGov surveys have found that rates of anti-Semitism are way higher in the Tory party than in the Labour Party, and asking why they're so keen to deflect away from the problem of anti-Semitism in their own ranks by criticising a party that has lower levels of anti-Semitism than their own.

Then you can ask them subsidiary questions about things like Theresa May's vile UKIP-pandering anti-immigrant legislation that has been used to dehumanise and discriminate against the Windrush Generation, Jacob Rees-Mogg promoting the German far-right on Twitter, the fact the Tories put up an extreme-right white-supremacist as a local election candidate in Watford, or the fact that they simply wait for the public fuss to die down and then let their racists and bigots slide back into the party later on.

5. Why did your party defeat Amendment 58?

The Tory probably won't even know what you're talking about because the mainstream media barely touched this incredibly important parliamentary vote, so you'll have to explain it to them.

When the Tories put their EU Withdrawal Bill before parliament in January 2018 the opposition parties all supported a Labour Party amendment to stop the government from using Brexit as a Trojan horse to scrap our workers' rights, environmental laws, food standards, consumer protections, and equality legislation.

The Tories (including CUK squatter hero Anna Soubry) and their sectarian DUP mates voted the amendment down, presumably because they wanted to reserve the right to trash our workers' rights, environmental laws, food standards, consumer protections, and equality legislation.

This absolute Tory refusal to build parliamentary consensus on Brexit in order to run the whole thing as a closed Tory shop is the main reason that Brexit has turned into such a humiliating deadline-missing farce under Theresa May's rule.

6. Which was the first local council to go insolvent?

The answer is that Tory run Northamptonshire was the first council to declare de facto insolvency in February 2018. This is incredible because the Tories have loaded all of their worst local government funding cuts onto non-Tory councils in northern England for the last nine years.

So despite having a massive artificial financial advantage over Labour run councils that have suffered much deeper austerity cuts, the Tories in Northamptonshire did such a woeful job that they were the first to break under the pressure.

7. How much are you Tories going to slash from the budget of my local school?

Since 2010 the Tories have implemented an unprecedented 8% per pupil funding cut to the schools budget, and they've also transferred ownership of literally thousands of schools to private profiteers who use bloated executive salaries and financial trickery to siphon as much cash as possible out of the education system into their own pockets.

Use this school cuts calculator to find out how much they're planning to slash from the budget of your local school (or the school your kids/grandchildren attend), make a note of it, then ask the question.

They won't know the answer so expect more bluff, bluster and misdirection tactics from them. Let them bluster away as much as they like, then tell them the figure and ask them whether they think it's acceptable that they're making children pay the cost of the 2007-08 bankers' crisis.

8. Are you proud of what you've done to our wages?

Ask the Tory canvasser if they're aware that since 2010 British workers have suffered the longest sustained collapse in the value of their wages since records began, and ask them if they're proud of having imposed this record breaking level of wage repression.

9. Why has housing become so unaffordable since 2010?

Ask the Tory canvasser whether they are aware that UK housing is more unaffordable than it's ever been before.

Then ask them whether they think that home ownership souring out of the reach of millions of ordinary people has anything to do with their wage repression policies, and the fact that between 2010 and 2017 the Tories oversaw the lowest levels of house building since the early 1920s.

10. How many more children are growing up in poverty since you lot came to power in 2010?

The answer is 400,000.

11. Why do you expect me to pay compensation for the consequences of your horrible policies?

The Tory government have announced a compensation scheme for the Windrush Brits who have been denied housing, employment, social security, pensions, and NHS treatment, and been made to live in fear of imprisonment and deportation as a result of Theresa May's brutal and unlawful "Hostile Environment" legislation.

What she hasn't been clear about is that the Windrush scandal came about because of her own vile UKIP-pandering anti-immigrant legislation in 2014.

So what she's actually saying by promising compensation is that she's going to completely evade responsibility for her own actions by not resigning, then compound matters by using public money to pay off the victims of her own malicious legislation.

See if you can get the Tory canvasser to admit that it's wrong for Theresa May to make the general public to pay the cost of her own horrible mistake, while she suffers no negative consequences at all.

12. Which political party has imposed the biggest armed forces cuts since the end of the Cold War?

The answer is the Tory party who have dramatically slashed the size of the armed forces since 2010.

They've reduced the army by over 20,000, the RAF by 8,500, and the navy by 5,500. 

General advice

Don't be afraid to print this article off and leave it by your front door so you can use it as a guide (I absolutely don't give a damn about copyright issues). These Tory canvassers will be speaking from a script, so it's totally fair for you to refer to notes too.

Feel free to compile other questions you can stump them with too. If there's some local issue or controversy you can hit them with use that, or take a scroll through this list of 50 disgraceful Tory controversies to find other issues that you're particularly concerned with and make note of them.

Remember that the information in this article doesn't specifically have to be presented in the form of questions, it can also be used to rebut several of the set talking points the Tory canvasser will try to raise.

Also remember that the longer you can keep the Tory canvasser engaged in discussion, the less time they'll have to try to convince other less well-informed people into voting Tory through their bombardment of lies and deceptions. It's actually much better for you to keep them occupied by asking them questions like these and watching their absurd displays of mental gymnastics, than just angrily telling them to get off your doorstep.

 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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Has Boris Johnson forgotten that he's a Tory?

One of the most extraordinary lies in British politics is the way Tory Brextremists have tried to pin the blame on immigrants and the EU for the dire consequences of their own ruinous austerity policies.

This Tweet from Boris Johnson is a perfect example of this kind of dishonesty. All four of the areas he dresses up as the "positive narrative of Brexit Britain" are actually aspects of British life that are only failing so badly because of Tory rule.

Tackling crime

Boris Johnson knows perfectly well that his Tory party have slashed police funding by 30% since 2010. He knows they've also completely gutted funding for youth projects and outreach programmes. he knows that they slashed 21,000 police officer jobs, and shut down 600 police stations.

Boris Johnson knows that his party bears responsibility for the soaring violent and serious crime rate (especially knife crime, muggings, sex crimes, burglaries ...) and that EU legislation and free movement of EU citizens have nothing to do with the violent crime epidemic him and his fellow Tories have unleashed.

But he also knows people don't like violent crime, so if he presents Brexit as a solution to violent crime, then the gullible will believe him.

Investing in education

It takes an awful lot of brass neck for a Tory to present investment in education as a supposed benefit of Brexit Britain given that they've spent the last 9 years imposing an unprecedented 8% cut in per pupil education funding.

Aside from the unprecedented education funding cuts, the Tories have also transferred ownership of literally thousands of state-funded schools to private profiteers who have been topslicing vast sums out of our kids' education budgets via bloated executive salaries.

Johnson knows that his party have been slashing education funding to the bone at the same time as they allow a load of profiteering spivs to siphon vast sums out of the education system into their own pockets.

He also knows that these education cuts and the ideological vandalism of the education system have absolutely nothing to do with the EU. It's pure Toryism.

Building houses

Johnson knows that since 2010 the Tories have overseen the lowest rate of new house building of any peacetime government since the 1920s. He also knows that as a result house prices have risen to the least affordable levels ever, and that without financial support from wealthy parents, younger generations are completely priced out of the housing market.

Johnson knows that this feeble level of house building had absolutely nothing to do with EU policy, and everything to do with the Tory government's abject failure to fix Britain's shambolic housing market in the wake of the 2008 bankers' insolvency crisis.

He also knows that quitting the EU will do nothing to improve this situation in itself, and that only the intensely gullible would trust the Tory party to deal with the housing crisis that they have exacerbated so badly over the last nine years.

Investing in the NHS

It's as if Johnson imagines we're all so gullible that we'll just have forgotten his '£350 million for the NHS' lies during the EU referendum campaign, and mindlessly accept the idea that the party that has been catastrophically under-investing in the health service for the last 9 years will suddenly set about rescuing it once Brexit happens.

For the last 9 years Johnson's Tory mates have starved the NHS of funding during a period of rising demand, closed down scores of NHS facilities across the country, waged ideological war on the junior doctors, trashed NHS recruitment by scrapping NHS bursaries, and given away £billions worth of NHS services and facilities to their corporate mates.

The NHS is one of the world's finest examples of socialism in action which the Tory party fought tooth and nail to prevent when Labour created in in 1948, and only the most wilfully ignorant of people would believe Tory promises to save the NHS that they've spent the last 9 years under-funding, ideologically vandalising, and asset stripping.

It's also worth considering that a Tory-administered Brexit represents a very clear threat to the continued existence of the NHS, given that a massive NHS carve-up for the benefit of US-based private health corporations will be one of the primary objectives of the Tory-Trump trade deal the likes of Boris Johnson will be begging for in the wake of the UK quitting the largest trading block on the planet.

How gullible are we?

Literally thousands of people have Retweeted Boris Johnson's Orwellian propaganda narrative that in Brexit Britain the Tories are suddenly going to entirely reverse their police-slashing, house price-inflating, school-underfunding, NHS-vandalising policies of the last 9 years.

It's quite difficult to imagine how so many people are so absurdly gullible, but the almost total lack of mainstream media condemnation of the Tories' ruinous austerity fanaticism has obviously played a part in allowing Boris Johnson and his ilk to present the devastating consequences of their own damned actions as reasons to be cheerful about the EU.

 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 two biggest lies in British politics

Whatever our political views, or our position on Brexit, it's impossible to deny that British politics is now in an absolutely farcical state.

After almost three years to prepare for it, the Tory government have twice missed their own Brexit deadlines, and left themselves no choice but to go grovelling to EU leaders to beg for extensions in order to avoid the danger of the "no deal" Brexit meltdown that they repeatedly bluffed that they were going to launch if they didn't get their own way!

Whether you think Brexit is a great idea, terrible nonsense, or somewhere in between, only the delusional would try to argue that Brexit hasn't turned into an absolute shambles.

So how did we get here?

There are obviously all manner of interrelated reasons, but one of the biggest reasons of all is the susceptibility of the British public to believe in the most absurd political lies, and two political lies in particular have played crucial roles in creating this nationally humiliating Brexit farce.

The austerity lie

In the wake of the 2008 financial sector insolvency crisis the Conservative party launched an extraordinary propaganda campaign to shift blame for the crisis from the reckless bankers who gambled themselves into insolvency onto the Labour government.

Of course the Blair-Brown neoliberal incarnation of Labour shared some measure of responsibility for failing to oversee the financial sector and regulate the risks they were taking, but in the pre-crisis era it's vital to remember that the Tory opposition continually demanded even more financial sector deregulation!

As the crisis was brewing the Tories weren't warning of the dangers and offering to do things more sensibly, they were demanding that Labour deregulate even further and make the risks even greater!

After the Tories established the lie that the Labour government were to blame for the global financial sector crisis and the Lib-Dems enabled them into power in 2010, they set about their agenda of transferring the cost of the bankers' crisis onto the poor and ordinary people who make up the majority of the British population.

They imposed ruinous austerity policies, ruthlessly slashed vital public services like the NHS, policing, and education, gutted local government funding, oversaw the worst period of collapsing real terms wages since records began, vandalised the social safety net, built the lowest number of new houses since the 1920s, and reduced infrastructure funding to the lowest rate of any country in the developed world.

Meanwhile they rewarded the bankers and speculators who caused the crisis in the first place by slashing taxes for corporations and the mega rich, lavishing unprecedented handouts on the asset rich, and creating a privatisation bonanza by handing out £billions of state assets on the cheap, or completely for free.

They made the majority of people pay for the crisis while they simultaneously worked to transfer ever more wealth to the mega-rich class who caused the crisis in the first place!

The Brexit lie

Millions of Brits felt the pinch of reduced living standards through stagnating wages, failing public services, low-paid insecure work, destruction of the social safety net, reduction of in-work benefits, and severe local government cutbacks, but the next Tory lie was even more brazen than the last.

Instead of admitting that all of this suffering was the result of their (by then completely discredited) ideological austerity agenda, they opportunistically pinned the blame for the consequences of their own hard-right policies onto immigrants and the EU in order to propagandise in favour of Brexit.

Tory Brextremists cynically weaponised the dire consequences of their own austerity lie in order to create their next massive lie.

The opportunistic Tory Brextremists own the majority of the blame for this grotesque Brexit lie, but the centrists own a fair share of responsibility too.

Between 2010 and 2015 the Lib-Dems actively participated in the Tory austerity government, so they could hardly set the record straight on the Tory Brexit lie without implicating themselves as culprits in the living standards collapse they helped the Tories to deliver.

The Labour right-wingers also share a portion of the blame too because their pathetic "austerity-lite" positioning at the 2015 general election gave the English public virtually no means of fighting back against austerity other than protest-voting for the Green Party in a rigged electoral system where they didn't stand a chance of making any real breakthrough.

The architects of Labour's "austerity-lite" agenda Ed Balls (who lost his seat) and Chris Leslie (who defected to the CUK squatters) are complicit in creating Brexit because they pathetically acquiesced to the Tory austerity lie instead of standing up and fighting the Tory malice and deception head on.

If the centrists had actively confronted economically illiterate Tory austerity fanaticism head on, instead of actively enabling it and pathetically imitating it, then it's highly unlikely that we'd ever have ended up in the farcical situation we're in now.

Why do people end up believing such obvious lies?

The Tories blamed the Labour government for a financial crisis caused by the mega-rich in order to dupe the majority of British people into believing that we all deserved to be economically punished with austerity dogma, and then the Tory Brextremists blamed the collapsing living standards caused by this ruinous austerity agenda on immigrants and the EU in order to break Britain's membership of the biggest trading block on the planet.

So how did so many millions of people end up believing these absurd lies and actively re-electing the party that kept telling them?

It's tempting just to blame these millions as idiots who will believe any old nonsense, but a widespread lack of critical thinking skills isn't actually the fault of the individuals, it's clearly the product of an education system that rewards obedience and rote learning more than it rewards questioning and critical thinking.

If kids spend a decade and a half learning to unquestioningly rote learn and repeat what the teacher authority figures tell them in order to get the dopamine hit of praise and good grades, then what do we expect of them in adulthood when they end up reading the hard-right propaganda rags and watching BBC political output that steadfastly refuses to provide balanced coverage on austerity fanaticism?

Is it any wonder that millions end up uncritically rote learning and believing nonsensical lies?

If the mainstream media was fit for purpose then the debate over austerity fanaticism would have raged endlessly since 2010, rather than most journalists simply accepting the outright lie that there was no alternative to punishing the majority to pay the cost of a financial crisis engineered by the mega-rich minority.

The BBC are especially to blame because when it comes to issues like climate change or extreme-right terrorism, they're always willing to "balance" sensible or scientific views with the mad ramblings of science-deniers and far-right extremists.

But when it came to the economic illiteracy of Tory austerity fanaticism, they threw "impartiality" out of the window to simply accept austerity dogma as essentially unquestionable, and never ever sought to balance their political panels with at least as many anti-austerity voices as pro-austerity ones. 

The mainstream media deserve a large share of the blame for their outright refusal to subject ruinous Tory austerity fanaticism to the constant barrage of scepticism that it so richly deserved, and then for their complicity with the Tory blame-shifting lie that immigrants and the EU were to blame for the consequences of their own hard-right austerity agenda.

If the mainstream media hack pack were even remotely interested in holding the powerful to account then the vast majority of Brits would have been well aware that Tory austerity was always a con job, and that austerity dogma was the primary reason for the collapse in living standards that Brexiteers gleefully blamed on immigrants and the EU.

If the mainstream media had actually worked to hold the Tories to account on their austerity lies during the 2010-2015 austerity coalition, then there's absolutely no way they could have got away with blaming the dire consequences on immigrants and the EU.

The mistake of course is the assumption that it's the job of mainstream media journalists to hold the powerful to account, when reality proves over and again that the majority of them actually see it as their job to act as gatekeepers of public discourse tasked with shutting out and relentlessly smearing those who dare to question the establishment order.

They don't get paid lavish six and seven figure salaries for questioning the establishment order, they get paid so handsomely for defending it.

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