Welcome to the Brexit Bullshitter Con

The BBC Breaking News image is familiar to everyone in Britain, and despite their glaring impartiality failings on issues like austerity fanaticism, ridiculously unbalanced political panels, partisan plants in audiences, and their failures to address raging anti-Muslim bigotry in the Tory ranks, they still have an awful lot more credibility than some obscure opaquely-funded Brexit-promoting website.

Hence the Brexit partisans running the obscure opaquely-funded Brexit-promoting website simply rip off the BBC's Breaking News logo in order to con people into clicking the link.

According to the Facebook shares logo on the page, this con works incredibly well, with 30,000+ people having liked the article.

As for the article itself, it's absolutely lamentable. It refers to a supposed 50 page report by the discredited Brexit-fixated economist Patrick Minford, but doesn't even provide a link so you can read and judge this report for yourself.

The audience is simply supposed to believe the idea that Britain would be £135 billion richer based on the say so of the author, a couple of (really quite rubbish) quotes from Minford, and a screen shot of some figures with absolutely no explanation of how they were calculated.

The reality of course is that a chaotic "no deal" Brexit would be the worst possible option for every single region of the UK. 

This isn't just my opinion, it's the conclusion of the impact studies the Tory government desperately tried to hide from the British public as they simultaneously threatened to cause a "no deal" calamity if they didn't get their own way.

Once you finish reading the article, the links to other stories on the website provide a very clear indication of the depths these people will stoop to, with one article declaring that the Queen is supposedly furious with Jeremy Corbyn for saying that there should be a confirmatory referendum on Brexit, whatever form it takes.

The source for this bold assertion that the Queen is "angered" by Corbyn and publicly accusing him of "betraying the British people"?

There simply isn't one.
 

The lamentable standard of "journalism" on display
here would shame even the worst hack in the BBC

It's attributed to the opinion of unnamed "supporters’ [sic] of the Monarch", which could be the authors of the Brexit Bullshitter Con website for all we know.

How it's possible to pose as a supporter of the monarch and then ascribe fake and damaging political opinions to her, just to suit your own hyper-partisan political slant?

I'm no supporter of the monarchy but I'd never stoop to making up an opinion and ascribing it to one of them to push my own political agenda, so even anti-monarchists like me have actually got more respect for the Queen than these fakery-peddling Brexit freaks.

In conclusion. Don't believe everything you read on the Internet.

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

OR

Beware of people using bad faith delegitimisation tactics

Before we even get started let's be absolutely clear that I'm not saying centrists are the same as the modern day extreme-right. I'm not doing that, so don't even dare try to misrepresent my point to pretend that I am.

Yes centrists wilfully collude with the extreme-right in preference to working with the left, as in the Lib-Dem pact with UKIP to take control of Bolton Council, or the Centre Party's fateful decision in 1933 to seal their own destruction by elevating Adolf Hitler to German Chancellor. And yes both ideologies revere capitalism. But nobody is pretending that they're the same.

What I am going to point out is that centrists and the modern day extreme-right have a tendency to use the exact same cynical debating trickery to delegitimise their critics, or anyone who dares question the groupthink of their ideology.

The extreme-right continually present their critics as being motivated by hatred of Britain and hatred of (their utterly warped interpretation of) "British values". They also regularly claim that opponents of their ideology are the victims of "brainwashing".

Centrists use the exact same tactic, repeatedly insinuating that criticism of their beloved ideology is motivated by hatred, bitterness, or insanity, and delighting in the accusation that anyone supporting the anti-austerity, anti-privatisation, pro-investment politics of the Labour left is a "cultist".

If you don't believe our propaganda, you're 'brainwashed'.

If you don't believe in our unquestionable centrist groupthink, then you're a 'cultist'.

It's the exact same delegitimisation tactic, and it's absolutely commonplace in both ideologies.

The point of it is to deter people from even considering the critique of their own ideology by labelling the critic as dangerous, unstable, insane, brainwashed, motivated by hate, or whatever other slur they can think of.

They don't want people actually debating the topic at hand, so they concentrate all of their effort on delegitimising the source, in the hope that others will not even bother looking into what the argument is actually about.

It's the tactic of bad faith cowards who know that they'd lose the argument if the debate was conducted fairly and decently, so they resort to cynical delegitimisation trickery to prevent that from happening.

Lib-Dems

I think it's important to criticise the Liberal Democrats for their role in helping the Tories enforce the living standards destroying austerity fanaticism that laid the groundwork for Brexit, then cashing in on the crisis they helped create by posing as glorious saviours who are going to rescue us all from the madness by ... errr ... printing up "Bollocks to Brexit" T-shirts" and begging for another referendum with no deal Tories running the show so they can totally rig the ballot by picking the options, wording, and timing of the vote to their own advantage.

It doesn't matter how much you base your criticism on facts, evidence, logic, and links to verifiable sources, the Lib-Dem response in the comments always consists of the same barrage of evasions, deflections, straw man misrepresentations, whataboutery, excuses, absurd Lib-Dem fairy stories, outright lies, and cynical delegitimisation tactics.

The strategy is to deflect debate away from the actual criticisms, and undermine the critic with claims that they must be insane, brainwashed, hysterical, deluded, or motivated by hate to even dare trying to criticise the ideological groupthink.

Ian Dunt

If you're not on Twitter you probably won't be familiar with this guy, but he's hot shit in the centrist and Remainer echo chambers like FBPE.

He's one of these noxious Remain Ultras who gets off on sneering at left-behind working class communities (rather than reaching out to try to explain that the living standards collapse they experienced was caused by domestic austerity fanaticism, not immigrants and the EU), smearing all Leave voters as horrible right-wingers, and constructing bizarre fantasies that the UK was some kind of magnificent utopia under the Tory/Lib-Dem Austerity Coalition, before Brexit arrived, out of nowhere, and ruined everything.

He's a toxic Remainer who does more damage to the Brexit-sceptic cause with his wittering than good, and if other Remainers had any vague understanding of the strategic need to actually attract people to the cause rather than driving them away with toxic groupthink nonsense, they wouldn't revere and retweet him so god-damned much.

So the Guardian columnist Dawn Foster wrote an exceptional article in the Guardian criticising the Labour deputy leader Tom Watson for his campaign of internal wrecking tactics, and having a dig at the kind of centrist groupthink that Dunt and his ilk absolutely revel in.

Obviously Dunt hated it, but his Twitter response was absolutely telling.

Instead of critiquing any of the actual points raised in the article, or presenting anything even remotely counter-evidence, he resorted to ridiculing it as "off planet" insane, before questioning the fact that the mainstream media would allow such opinions to be published at all!

1. Refuse to debate or critique any of the actual points raised, simply deride opposing opinions as insane "thought crime".  

 2. Demand the mainstream media only ever promote the 'correct' groupthink worldview. 

 How is this mentality any different from the mentality of the far-right?

How is it even remotely possible to consider this kind of delegitimisation of non-conformist views, and craving for media censorship as any kind of liberalism?

Conclusion

As I said in the introduction I'm not arguing that centrism and the extreme-right are the same thing, so don't even try to pretend that I am.

What I'm saying is that their ideological adherents are prone to using the exact same delegitimisation tactics to deter people from even listening to their ideological opponents.

From deriding non-conformist opinions as insane, or deluded, or hate-motivated "thought crime" to demanding that the function of the mainstream media is solely to endlessly and unquestioningly repeat their own approved groupthink mentality.

Their politics may be different, but the illiberal and intolerant mindset, and the cynical debating trickery are very often exactly the same.

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

OR

The self-awareness deficiency of the common British street thug

In case the news passed you by, the extreme-right hate preacher Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley Lennon) has been found guilty of contempt of court for ignoring court reporting restrictions, and risking the collapse of three interlinked child sex abuse prosecutions, despite having been previously warned to stop ignoring court orders.

Instead of taking it on the chin, admitting he screwed up, and accepting the judgement of the British rule of law, the treacherous little shit-weasel has resorted to attacking the most senior judge in the English and Welsh legal system as a "liar", and begging Donald Trump for political asylum in the United States!

The lack of self-awareness of this self-styled patriot is extraordinary.

His actions demonstrate that he doesn't actually love Britain or British institutions at all. He hates our justice system and our rule of law, and he seeks to flee the country entirely when things go against him.

There are of course a few problems with street thug Tommy's appeal for asylum in Trump's America. 

The main problem being that he's banned for life from the United States for fraudulently entering the country on a false passport.

Another glaring problem is that his convictions for violent assault and his public boasting about Class A drug use mean that he should definitely be refused entry at the border.

And then there's the sheer hypocrisy of it.

Just imagine the uproar Tommy and his rabble would make if a foreign hate preacher had been thrown out of Britain for life for entering on a fake passport, then cheekily put in an appeal for asylum to the British government to escape being jailed in their own country.

They'd be going absolutely ballistic about it.

But because it's their beloved street thug behaving in this extraordinary way, they're actually rallying around to support him, and repeating his pathetic sob stories about how being punished for his own unlawful behaviour makes him the poor innocent victim of political persecution.

Another problem for Yaxley-Lennon is what to do with all of his property he's invested in, using the donations from all of the absolute dupes who throw so much cash at him?

Surely if he flees Britain in order to evade justice, it must be possible to seize his property, which would provide an excellent opportunity to turn his luxuriant £1 million countryside mansion in Bedfordshire into a refugee hostel until he decides to come back from hiding and see out his sentence?

But the most glaring issue of all is the absolutely barefaced demonstration that Yaxley-Lennon is no patriot at all, to the point of hating and repeatedly undermining our judicial system, then begging a foreign leader to step in and rescue him from the consequences of his own unlawful actions.

This treacherous behaviour gets down to a deeper truth: Claims of patriotism from the modern extreme-right are an absolute fraud.

Theirs is an internationalist movement, in which they're far more likely to adore a misogynist bully like Trump, or an extreme-right harridan like Marine Le Pen, or a murderous extreme-right terrorists like the Christchurch mosque killer or the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter, because of their shared political ideology, than they are to even tolerate and respect their fellow countrymen who happen not to share their extremist views.

The truth is that it's all about ideology to extreme-right agitators like Yaxley-Lennon, and the flags of the nations they happen to inhabit serve as nothing more than convenience to them. As visual bait to lure in the kind of mindless unthinking idiot who imagines that as long as it's wrapped itself in the national flag, then it unquestionably has to be a true patriot.

But even as Yaxley-Lennon trash-talks the British judicial system and begs to become a migrant in a foreign land to escape the consequences of his own actions, the hard-of-thinking will continue throwing their cash at him, because easily-duped idiots will always behave like easily-duped idiots.

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

OR

6 reasons you should detest Vince cable and the Lib-Dems

A lot of people, especially hardcore Remainers, don't seem to understand why the Lib-Dems are such a reviled and toxic brand.

Just about the briefest possible explanation is that they wilfully helped a radically right-wing Tory government absolutely trash the living standards of tens of millions of people which eventually resulted in the Brexit backlash, then demonstrated their total lack of contrition by elevating possibly the worst offender of all to lead their party.

After two years at the helm their beloved Saint Vince is on his way out, but that the two vying to replace him (Jo Swinson and Ed Davey) were both such enthusiastic austerity-wreckers that they were more loyal to the Tory whip than the current Tory leadership candidate Jeremy Hunt! 

Another extremely clear indication of the fact they're not even remotely sorry about what they did.

So in this article I'm going to run through six things that should make any remotely decent person recoil in disgust at Vince Cable's behaviour, and the Lib-Dems for not only keeping him on, but actually lifting him up to be their beloved leader.

1. The Royal Mail

You probably know that the Tory/Lib-Dem Austerity Coalition decided to outright defy the public will by flogging off Royal Mail in 2013.

As Business Secretary Vince Cable was personally responsible for the process, and he managed it in such a way that it essentially turned into a vast fraud against the British public that cost us hundreds of millions of pounds.

The first element of the fraud was Vince's decision to limit members of the public to a maximum of £749 worth of shares, whilst allowing city speculators to buy up unlimited amounts of shares. 

This meant that the vast majority of the profits from the privatisation scam he pulled would be gobbled up by city spivs.

The second element was deliberate under-valuation. The Royal Mail's extensive property portfolio was assigned a ludicrously low valuation in comparison to the the cost of buying a matching portfolio of thousands of acres of lucrative city centre land from scratch. 

Furthermore Cable ignored all the warnings that the initial share price was far too low, having chosen the lowest valuation of all supplied by a firm called Lazard.

The third element was the cash in.

When the share price immediately bounced upwards, and several of the city investors made instant £millions at the public expense by buying up millions of shares then flogging them when the price corrected like they knew it would. One of these corporate investors, which made themselves a staggering £8 million instant profit was Lazard, the very people who advised Cable to under-value the shares in the first place.

How Saint Vince decided not to bar them from the process is anyone's guess.

As for the property portfolio, the new private owners have raked in £hundreds of millions by flogging off chunks of Royal Mail land to property developers at the real market price and cashing in the enormous difference from Vince's extraordinary undervaluation in unearned profit.

2. Arming human rights abusers

One of Vince Cable's jobs as Business Secretary in the Austerity Coalition was to sign off on arms export contracts.

During his time in the job he signed off on weapons sales to loads of countries on Britain's own watchlist of human rights abusers, including the homophobic, misogynistic, head-chopping, terrorism-spreading, democracy-crushing, journalist-dismembering Saudi war criminals.

Getting confused between your own socially liberal views and the Liberal Democrats because they have the word "liberal" in their names is kind of understandable if you don't really think about any of the details.

But anyone who is actually genuine about their social liberalism would steer well away from a party that saw absolutely no problem in flogging weapons to despots, tyrant, human rights abusers, and war criminals ... unless of course you're only really socially liberal when it comes to white Europeans like yourself, and don't give a shit about the human rights of brown people in far away lands who end up being tortured, maimed, and massacred by the weapons Saint Vince sold them.

3. Vince's money laundering loophole

In 2011 Vince Cable made an extraordinary decision to abolish identity checks on the registration of British companies.

This may not sound like a big deal, but it set off an extraordinary wave of criminality and money laundering.

The ability to set up a company in a country with a reputation as strong as the UK, in the space of only a few minutes, with virtually no risk of having your identity checked was an open invitation for every fraudster in the world to consider routing their ill-gotten gains through British shell companies.

Pressure groups, other countries, and the EU have pleaded with the UK to close this loophole, and begin insisting that the owners of British companies properly identify themselves, but the only person who has ever been convicted for setting up a fake company in the entire time is campaigner called Kevin Brewer, who set up a fake company called John Vince Cable Services Ltd, in order to demonstrate how Cable's reform made it so easy to create fake companies and masquerade as other people!

The guy who tried to blow the whistle on Saint Vince's tsunami of fraud got convicted in court for his efforts, while those responsible for the countless £billions in fraud that Cable unleashed get away scot free!

4. Austerity fanaticism

One of the worst things about Vince Cable was that in the wake of the global financial sector insolvency crisis he was one of the only UK politicians talking any kind of sense. He was capable of explaining how and why the collapse happened, and he also warned against excessive public spending cuts.

But as soon as the opportunity to become a government minister with the Tories presented itself, he completely changed his tune. From explaining the actual causes of the crisis, he flipped to joining in with the utterly dishonest and hyper-partisan Tory nonsense about "Labour bankrupting the economy".

But worse than this was his embrace of Tory austerity fanaticism. 

He knew that it was economically illiterate, he knew that it was bad for the economy, and he knew that repressing wages and stifling economic demand would smother the post-crisis economic recovery, but he joined in with it anyway in return for a six figure ministerial salary, a chauffeur driven car, and a temporary sense of self-importance.

And thus he wilfully helped the Tories to deliver the slowest economic recovery since reliable records began, despite knowing all along that the Tory austerity prescription was toxic economy-choking nonsense from the very beginning.

5. Brexit cynicism

Tory austerity policies like unprecedented wage repression, ruinous public service cuts, deliberate infrastructure under-investment, and wanton vandalism of the social safety net caused a massive collapse in UK living standards.

Then along came the Brexiteers to blame it all on immigrants and the EU.

Vince Cable could have come clean during the EU referendum and admitted that collapsing wages, failing public services, unaffordable housing, and the desperately failing social safety net had nothing to do with immigrants and the EU, and everything to do with the domestic UK government policy of austerity fanaticism.

But in order to say that he would have been admitting his own complicity in the living standards collapse, so instead he chose to say nothing, and allow the Brexiteers to use the living standards collapse he helped to engineer as a recruiting call for the Leave campaign.

And then after the Leave vote happened, Saint Vince has cynically positioned himself and his party as the wonderful saviours come to rescue the rest of us from the Brexit chaos he helped to create and unleash.

And to top it all off, what he's actually offering is the ridiculous strategically inept bollocks of another referendum with the Tories who created this Brexit mess still in charge and pushing for a no deal meltdown from the steps of Downing Street

At least a Labour government or Labour-based coalition would be firmly opposed to the insanity of no deal chaos, but Saint Vince wants the Tories running the ballot because if there's one thing he hates more than Brexit, it's the idea of a genuinely left-wing government ending ruinous austerity fanaticism, running the railways and water supply as not-for-profit public services, and making corporations and the mega-rich actually pay their taxes.

Saint Vince is like a mugger robbing your stuff and punching your teeth out, then expecting praise and gratitude for offering you a tissue to stem the flow of blood gushing from your gums!

But somehow people buy into it.

6. The rest of his voting record

I've detailed 5 things that Saint Vince has been directly involved with, but there's so much more to be found in his voting record.

Here's just some of the other stuff Saint Vince and the Lib-Dems "greatest hits" between 2010 and 2015:

• Relentlessly forcing the cost of the financial sector insolvency crisis onto poor and ordinary people, whilst simultaneously showering corporations and the mega-rich with one lavish tax cut and handout after another.

• Tripling university fees, despite pledging not to before the election, and rubbing salt into the wounds by tinkering with the repayment terms to introduce inflation+3% interest on the loans, meaning that a whopping 83% of graduates will never pay off their student debts despite entire working lifetimes of repayments!

• Bulldozing Charles Kennedy's legacy into a pit and burning it to ashes by voting to turn Libya into a vast lawless terrorism breeding ground just like the devastating chaos Kennedy so eloquently opposed in Iraq.

• Voting through Theresa May's Hostile Environment, which has been used to discriminate against and deport black British citizens from the Windrush generation.

• Introduction of unlawful Tribunal Fees designed to protect bad bosses by pricing low-income employees out of the justice system.

• Helping the Tories to annihilate police budgets, and totally gut funding for youth centres and early intervention schemes, which have led to a massive escalation in violent crime and gang culture.

• Forcing terminally ill people to go through discriminatory and degrading "fit for work" assessments for the crime of not dying quickly enough.

• Unprecedented cuts to NHS and social care budgets that have been associated with an estimated 130,000 people being driven into early graves.

• There's no remorse over the deliberate wage repression policies that led to the worst sustained decline in UK workers' wages on record, and set up an entire decade of lost wage growth.

• Voting through a massively wasteful top-down Tory reorganisation of the NHS that appeared in neither parties' manifestos) aimed at carving up as many NHS services as possible for distribution to private profiteers. 

• The establishment of a disgusting disability denial regime that has been condemned by the United Nations for "grave and systematic violations of disabled people's rights".

• Supporting all kinds of other deeply illiberal and hard right malice like Secret Courts, Bedroom Tax, enhanced snooping powers, the gagging law, hostile environment, Theresa May's family separation rules, privatised prisons, unlawful forced unpaid labour schemes, the draconian sanctions regime, instructing private contractors to deliberately discriminate against people with mental health conditions ...

Conclusion

The fact that the Lib-Dems picked Saint Vince as their beloved leader after all of this dreadful stuff just goes to show that they're not even remotely sorry.

And the fact that the two Lib-Dems vying to replace him come from the exact same "capital before people" mould show that they simply don't care about the damage they've done.

All they care about is finding another demographic to con into voting for them, just like they conned and betrayed the student vote, the electoral reformers, the anyone-but-Tory vote, and the anti-war demographic the last time they sneaked their way into power.

Don't be a dupe, and don't believe their deceptions, because you know exactly how much they're wiling to betray and exploit the people who stand with them, and you know exactly how unrepentant they are about the all of the disgusting things that nobody can deny that they did.

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

OR

The sheer Tory entitlement

It doesn't matter how badly you fail in life, if you're born into the gilded British establishment class then you'll be given once chance after another to completely screw even more things up.

Just look at the state of George Osborne. Only the most brainwashed of Tory tribalists could even try to argue that his six year tenure as Chancellor of the Exchequer was anything but a disaster for the British economy.

• He pushed an economically illiterate austerity agenda from the very beginning, insisting that all the evidence from economic history showing that targeted infrastructure investment and the creation of skilled jobs are the drivers of economy recovery was wrong, and that wanton across the board austerity cuts, the proliferation of exploitative low-paid McJobs, and a endless tax cuts and handouts for corporations and the mega-rich were the only way out of the banker's insolvency crisis!

• He missed every economic target he set himself, most notably the promise that austerity fanaticism would have completely eliminated the budget deficit by early 2015. It's well over four years past his deadline, he's been gone for three years, and it's still nowhere near eradicated.

• All of these missed targets meant that he ended up creating more new debt than every single Labour government in history combined.

• Osbornomics resulted in the slowest post-crisis economic recovery in modern British history, going back at least two Centuries to when economic records were extremely crude.

• Osborne also delivered the worst collapse in the value of UK workers' wages since records began, meaning we're still earning less in real terms than we were a decade ago.

• Despite staking his reputation on Britain keeping its AAA Credit Rating, he lost it for the first time since the 1970s!

• After only a few years of austerity stagnation even devoutly neoliberal economic organisations like the OECD and the IMF were warning against the ideological fanaticism of austerity cuts, but Osborne soldiered on regardless.

• And to top it all off the collapse in living standards caused by Tory austerity fanaticism, wage repression, pubic service cuts, infrastructure under-investment, and welfare vandalism caused a Brexit backlash that was sufficient to push Leave marginally over the winning line and dump the UK into the three years of interminable chaos we've suffered since.

After losing his job as Chancellor and quitting as an MP Osborne took up a number of jobs. Several of them look just like the kind of highly-paid corporate directorship bribes you'd expect him to receive after carving up so many public assets to give away to city spivs, and slashing Corporation Tax to by far the lowest rate in the G7. But becoming Editor of the London Evening Standard was quite a surprise given his absolute lack of experience in the newspaper trade.

Within a couple of years in the Evening Standard job Osborne has reduced a slightly profitable news outlet into an extraordinary money-burning pit, losing a staggering £23 million in the last two years.

But now Christine Lagarde is potentially moving on as head of the IMF for a position in the EU, George Osborne and his cheerleaders are promoting him as her replacement!

The absolute entitlement of it is staggering. His incompetence as Chancellor will go down in economic history as a lesson in exactly what not to do after a crisis, his tenure at the Evening Standard is an absolute joke, and here he is pushing himself forward for one of the top economics jobs on the planet!

presumably the rest of the world will piss themselves laughing at the idea of the most incompetent British finance minister in living memory fancying himself for such a job, but that hasn't stopped the Tory press from championing the idea as if they actually see him as some kind of magnificent economic genius, rather than a living embodiment of Britain's dangerous subservience to over-entitled and under-qualified Tory toffs.

What a country we live in where poor and ordinary people experience one barrier after another to progression no matter how capable they are (sexism, racism, classism, regionalism, homophobia, lack of old school connections ...) while those born into the gilded establishment class can stumble from one unbelievably catastrophic cock-up to another, and remain perfectly confident that there's always another high profile and lavishly remunerated position for them to waltz into.

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

OR

We need to talk about Remainer Unicorns

Now I know I've pissed off a lot of people by pointing out that people on the extreme Remain fringe are every bit as toxic as the Brextremists, but I'm going to have to address the subject again.

And again I'll include a massive disclaimer that I'm not generalising about all Brexit-sceptics - which would be stupid because I'm a Brexit-sceptic myself - but highlighting the ridiculous and counter-productive behaviour of some people on the polar fringe of the debate.

And again a load of Remainers will turn up in the comments to cry victim and cynically pretend that I'm generalising about all Remainers in order to discredit the argument that some people on the Remain side are just awful strategically inept people who do far more harm to the cause than good.

We all know the routine by now.

A.C. Grayling

Anyone who is on Twitter will be familiar with AC Grayling's lamentable output, which consists mainly of intense Remain fanaticism, burning Corbyn-hate, relentless Lib-Dem apologism, endless refusal to address the actual causes of Brexit, and seething contempt for people with different views to his own.

In short Grayling is exactly the kind of smug, insular, arrogant, sneering Remainer that breathes so much life into the Brexiteer caricature of all Remainers being aloof out-of-touch metropolitan elitists.

Sinn Féin

The Irish independence party Sinn Féin have repeatedly warned that a chaotic "no deal" Tory-administered Brexit would ruin the Good Friday peace agreement.

I'm sure we can all see how the re-imposition of a hard border in Northern Ireland is both against the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, and risks inflaming sectarian violence in Northern Ireland.

But instead of simply agreeing with the warning, AC Grayling went a lot further in an extraordinary Tweet, demanding that Sinn Féin MPs take up their seats in parliament, and twice referring to the fight for Irish independence as a "fetish".

Remanier Unicorns

One of the favourite endlessly-repeated tropes in Remainer echo-chambers is to refer to pretty much anything to do with Brexit as "chasing unicorns" or "unicornism".

Of course a lot of the stuff Brexiteers come out with, like Boris Johnson's Gatt 24 nonsense, or the absurd idea of an "orderly "no deal" are flagrant nonsense that absolutely deserves to be ridiculed and derided.

The problem of course occurs when one of the most high-profile Remain campaigners on social media proposes an absolutely ridiculous "unicorn" solution to Brexit.

Sinn Féin will never ever take their seats in Westminster because to do so would involve swearing allegiance to the Queen, and sitting in the parliament of a what they consider to be an illegitimate and hostile occupying power.

Ireland was brutally repressed by the mainly-English aristocracy for Centuries, including the savage execution of the Easter Rising revolutionaries, and avowed Irish republicans certainly aren't ever going to legitimise London-rule by pledging allegiance to the Queen and taking up their seats in Westminster.

Respect them or loathe them, at least they stick to their principles and stay out of the parliament they want to be rid of, unlike the Brexiteers who turn up in ever larger numbers in the European Parliament in order to laze around collecting salaries and expenses for doing absolutely bollocks all beside displays of grandstanding gesture politics for the "stick it to Johnny Foreigner" mob.

Once again. Just to be absolutely clear: Sinn Féin will never take their seats in Westminster. 

Never.

Anyone who proposes this nonsense as a solution to the Brexit mess is just as guilty of wildly unrealistic unicornism as any Brexiteer.

Strategic ineptitude

The idiocy of calling for the impossible isn't even the worst of it. The worst of it is the decision to twice portray the fight for Irish independence as some kind of disgusting "fetish", rather than a legitimate political stance.

The use of such language absolutely reeks of entitled British-nationalist imperialism.

It implies that the long fight for Irish independence from London-rule was illegitimate and depraved, and that the entire existence of Ireland as an independent sovereign state is some kind of ungodly perversion.

It should be absolutely obvious that, when asking people to help you out by breaking their own firmly-held principles, it's an impossibly weak strategy to grossly insult their beliefs and the very existence of their nation.

And it's obviously not just Sinn Féin members that Grayling is insulting by delegitimising the fight for Irish independence, and the very existence of Ireland as an independent state, it's all Irish people, and everyone with Irish ancestry too.

When Brexit-sceptics need to form as many alliances as possible with our European neighbours, here we have a very high-profile English Remainer resorting to displays of toxic British nationalism against the Irish, and literally thousands of Remainers liking and retweeting his bile-laden nonsense.

Unionism and Irish reunification

A recent poll of Tory party members revealed that an overwhelming majority of them would gladly give up Britain's claim on Northern Ireland in return for their beloved Brexit.

So that's members of the Conservative and Unionist Party supporting Irish reunification because they're so obsessed with Brexit, but instead of criticising this extraordinary state of affairs, Grayling is trying to get Irish republicans to step in and save his beloved Union by ... errr ... insulting the very existence of their country as some kind of perverted abomination!

The irony and logical incoherence is extraordinary. He doesn't seem to care that avowed Unionists have given up on his beloved Union, but he's going to insult Irish republicans in the hope that makes them step in and save it!

And this guy is supposed to be a public intellectual!

Consequences

Just imagine if the impossible did come true and Sinn Féin politicians did decide to dishonestly pledge allegiance to the Queen in order to enter the British parliament and put a stop to Brexit.

How do you think that would pay in the mainstream media?

You'd have to be utterly delusional to think this wouldn't be portrayed as a nasty bunch of hostile Irish infiltrators sneaking in to ruin our beloved patriotic Brexit, or to think that such a move wouldn't be immensely detrimental to the Brexit-sceptic cause.

Conclusion

Not all Brexit-sceptics are toxic and delusional, but the enduring popularity of AC Grayling, and the fact that even the most delusional, counter-productive, and downright offensive of his Tweets garner thousands of likes and retweets is an indicator that the "dick head quotient" is actually pretty high.

The problem is of course that just because somebody holds the same view as you do on an important issue like Brexit, doesn't mean that they're an ally of yours to be uncritically retweet whatever nonsense they come out with, and tribalistically defended because you see them as fellow members of your tribe.

Once you see people resort to delusional and offensive nonsense it's really important to think about how much damage it actually does to the cause you support.

Any legitimate political movement needs internal criticism and debate, otherwise the loudest and most toxic attention seekers end up forcing their way to the forefront.

And to see a very high-profile Remainer proposing ridiculous unicornism and spitting undiluted British nationalist hate at the Irish, and getting masses of support and retweets is compelling evidence that the anti-Brexit movement is allowing toxic attention seekers like AC Grayling to do exactly that.

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

OR