Twitter is suddenly full of hard-right polemicists filling their nappies over the story about the Virgin West Coast rail franchise deciding to stop selling copies of the Daily Mail on their trains.
Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Julia Hartley-Brewer, Isabel Hardman, Fraser Nelson, Daniel Hannan, Michael Ashcroft, and a wave of assorted Tories, Ukippers, Biffers, and Brextremists have all posted hysterical comments about this so called "ban".
The main problem with this whole pathetic story is that the fuss is so grotesquely disproportionate to what's actually happened.
Nobody is banning people from taking copies of the Daily Mail onto the train, and nobody is banning anyone from using the on board WiFi to access the Daily Mail website.
In reality the private train company has decided to stop selling issues of the paper on board the trains, mainly because they were only selling 70 copies per day!
The incredible amount of froth and noise over this ludicrous non-story is quite remarkable from a bunch of people who never seem to stop yelling "snowflake!" and "social justice warrior!" at anyone to the left of Joseph Goebbels who takes offence at anything or calls for any kind of social change.
It's almost as if they're a bunch of total hypocrites isn't it?
How is it possible to explain all of this hypocritical right-wing hysteria over a newspaper market that's worth a paltry £45.50 per day (70 x 65p a copy).
The reason the hard-right have decided to have such nappy-filling tantrums over this story is because they know that facts are almost entirely irrelevant to their target audience.
They know that a story like this is perfect material for the victim complex mentality they work tirelessly to foster amongst the cognitively lazy.
The fact that this decision actually involves such a trivial number of newspapers (just 0.004% of the Daily Mail's circulation) is completely irrelevant because the person this kind of trope is aimed at will already be too consumed with the desired feelings of rage, hate, and self-pity over the story to ever consider checking the facts for themselves.
The reason the hard-right foster the sense of self-pity with this kind of hyperbolic grievance-mongering is that they know that once people have had their victim complexes inflated to the size of hot air balloons, it only takes the slightest puff of air to get them all mindlessly floating in the desired political direction.
Then there's very real examples of public transport censorship. Regular readers of this page will know that access to Another Angry Voice is blocked by the onboard WiFi of multiple public transport companies, including Arriva.
Are the hard-right up in arms about the fact that the private profiteers who operate swathes of our public transport system have chosen to censor a political blog that openly calls for the renationalisation of public transport?
Are the hard-right calling for public transport providers to stop blocking access to political sites on their onboard WiFi?
Of course they're not. And the reason is obvious. They don't really give a damn about freedom of speech at all.
All they really care about is creating simplistic political tropes to feed to the easily led about how the hard-right are the perpetual victims. They do this because grievance-mongering is an absolutely essential lubricant for the kind of socially and economically ruinous hard-right dogma these fanaticists are actually pushing behind the scenes.
Part of this ruinous hard-right dogma is the rail privatisation agenda which has seen the UK rail network carved up into franchises with the primary function of generating huge profits for their owners (be they private companies like Virgin, or foreign state rail operators).
One of the side-effects of this right-wing privatisation agenda is that the private companies that run the trains get to decide which newspapers they sell on board.
If the right-wing grievance-mongers had any wits about them at all, they'd be able to see their own culpability in the situation they're whipping themselves up into a frenzy about.
For all of the right-wing temper tantrums and soiled nappies over this pathetic non-story, one person is talking sense about the whole thing. Jeremy Corbyn has announced that there will be no newspaper "bans" once the railways are brought back into public ownership.
The irony of course is that if the right-wingers who have been filling their nappies over this non-story really want to be able to buy a copy of the Daily Mail on the train, they should vote for Jeremy Corbyn at the next election. And if they vote Tory they should accept that they're voting for the continuation of private profiteers leeching profits out of our rail network and deciding which newspapers they want to sell on board the trains.
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 2015 General Election was an absolute disaster to any non-Scottish person with even remotely progressive social values. The Scots could celebrate their remarkable wipe-out of the neoliberalism-fixated Westminster establishment parties, but elsewhere there was little to celebrate after Ed Miliband squandered his golden opportunity to win a landslide victory by opposing ruinous Tory austerity dogma, because he chose to offer a disgustingly unpalatable and uninspiring prescription of austerity-lite snake oil instead.
One of the few highlights of the 2015 election was the people of Wirral West seeing sense and ditching their atrocious MP Esther McVey.
The ruthlessly self-serving McVey had spent the previous three years acting as Iain Duncan Smith's merciless henchwoman at the DWP, and the people of Wirral West were rightly sickened and appalled at her callous attitudes towards the poor, the sick, the disabled, and the unemployed, so lost her seat, and her role in government.
McVey used to brag about how rising dependency of food banks is a good thing, and she also had a central role in promoting the draconian Tory sanctions regime.
The mainstream media rarely address the issue of the benefits sanction regime that McVey had such an important role in expanding, but even fleeting analysis reflects extremely badly on the Tory party, so it's no surprise it gets so little coverage.
The first thing to note about McVey's beloved sanctions regime is that despite a barrage of lies and denials (including from McVey herself), the Tories operated a system of benefits sanctions targets and league tables designed to incentivise Jobcentre staff into sanctioning quotas of people per month. The purpose being to drive down the unemployment figures by throwing people off benefits for the most trivial of infractions (people out of work and not claiming benefits are not classed as unemployed!).
The next thing to note is that the most likely people to get caught up in the Tory benefits sanctions regime are the most vulnerable. Just think about it for a moment. If you were a hard-pressed Jobcentre employee with a target of sanctioning let's say two people a week, would it be easier to go after the minority of hardened benefits scroungers who probably know the benefits rules better than you do yourself, or to trick a few people with mental health issues or learning disabilities into committing sanctionable mistakes?
Just take the case of the former soldier David Clapson who was sanctioned and left penniless. He died at home from diabetic ketoacidosis after his electricity was cut off leaving his supply of insulin to spoil in the fridge. When opposition MPs questioned McVey over the dangers of sanctioning vulnerable people like David Clapson, she responded by accusing them of "inflaming" the issue.
Just imagine the scheming callousness of a woman whose own policies have resulted in a man's death, who refuses to accept any responsibility, but instead tries to play politics by posing as the victim herself.
Another important thing to note is that Esther McVey repeatedly talked out of her posterior claiming that the sanctions regime exist to "help" the unemployed.
The reality is the exact opposite. Numerous studies have shown that leaving people penniless hinders their ability to find work. Just think about it. If you can't afford to eat properly, clean your clothes, get a haircut, public transport fares, your phone/Internet bill, the cost of printing CVs ... would you really be more likely to find a job? All the research says no you wouldn't. Esther McVey says yes you would.
Then there's the absolute kicker. It turns out that deliberately thrusting hundreds of thousands of people per year into absolute destitution actually costs the taxpayer more money than it saves in reduced benefits payments!
This means that Esther McVey's draconian system of condemning hundreds of thousands of people per year to absolute poverty actually costs the taxpayer vast sums of money, making it a grotesque example of taxpayer subsidised Tory malice.
After she was rejected by the people of Wirral West the Tories handed McVey a ticket back into Westminster by parachuting her into the super-safe Tory seat of Tatton at the 2017 General Election. Now, within the space of a year, Theresa May has actually appointed this callous and scheming woman as the head of the DWP.
Make no mistake, this appointment is a clear statement of intent from Theresa May. She's not going to reverse course and stop squandering taxpayers' cash on the kinds of wasteful, socially destructive, and downright malicious Tory impoverishment schemes favoured by Iain Duncan Smith.
In fact she's decided to double-down on this kind of disgusting hard-right malice by appointing the cruellest and most uncaring of Iain Duncan Smith's minions to carry on his work of punishing and abusing the poor and vulnerable.
You couldn't really get a stronger indication of Theresa May's absolute contempt for the welfare of the poorest and most vulnerable people in society than the appointment of Esther McVey as the head of the DWP.
So be warned. This is Theresa May's unmistakable message to the people of Britain: "don't get old, don't get sick, and don't lose your job".
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.
After eight days of damaging revelations about the odious hard-right polemicist Toby Young, he has resigned from the Tory government's new universities watchdog.
Young had tried to hide his disgusting past by deleting some 50,000 Tweets, but people had already taken screenshots of some of the worst comments including anal rape 'jokes', casual misogyny and homophobia, a description of masturbating over images of starving children, and crude comments about the breasts of an underage girl.
Aside from the shower of gross Twitter comments there was Young's journalistic output, which included an article admitting the supply of cocaine, an article describing his efforts to trick lesbian women into having sexual contact with him, and most concerning of all, articles in which he tried to rehabilitate the concept of eugenics.
Had this been a Labour Party figure (like Jared O'Mara for example), we all know what the reaction would have been from the likes of Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, and the hard-right Guido Fawkes blog. But instead of a tidal wave of faux outrage we witnessed a week-long exercise in ridiculous Tory excuse-making.
Theresa May said that she was "not impressed" by Toby Young's comments, but refused to sack him; Boris Johnson described Young as having a "caustic wit" as if describing wanking over dying children is the work of a modern day Oscar Wilde; Toby Young even thanked the Guido Fawkes blog for their support in his ludicrous Facebook self-exoneration; and the universities minister Jo Johnson (the brother of Boris) even found himself defending anal rape jokes and modern eugenics in parliament after opposition MPs secured an emergency debate over Toby Young's appointment.
After a the furore showed no signs of dying down after a week the Tories even circulated a memo urging Tory MPs to deflect attention away from Toby Young by attacking and smearing Labour politicians. This wasn't just members of the Tory boys club sticking up for their horrible mate, it was an orchestrated effort by the Tory party machine to defend the indefensible.
Despite the desperate rearguard action from the Tory party machine, the pressure eventually told and Toby Young gave in and announced his resignation. It's astounding that despite all the repulsive comments and articles, he was allowed to walk away of his own volition, not fired.
The fact that the Tories stuck with such a repulsive and desperately unsuitable appointment to a supposedly neutral and impartial public sector role tells you all you need to know about how nasty they are, but there's another angle too.
The way they spent eight days robustly defending the indefensible and sustaining damage to their reputation just to let the guy resign illustrates their sheer incompetence.
Any competent organisation would have nipped the scandal in the bud by admitting the comments and pro-eugenics articles were unacceptable, and cancelling the appointment. But that's just not the way the Tory party works, especially under the weak and directionless leadership of Theresa May.
Toby Young is part of the Tory boys club and untouchable. Even if Theresa May had the inclination to sack him, she couldn't because she's in such a weak position and Toby's fellow members of the Tory boys club like Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, and Jo Johnson would have kicked up a stink that would have threatened her position as party leader, so as usual she put self-interest above all and let the obnoxious creep keep his position.
Even after Young's resignation, Tories like Jo Johnson are still intent on making the situation worse by continuing to spew one-sided Toby Young eulogies and smearing everyone who objected to his appointment as "armchair critics".
It's as if they genuinely can't see what's wrong with appointing such a savagely biased and repulsive character to a supposedly impartial public position, and they're going to take their fury out on any members of the general public with the rudimentary judgement skills necessary to see why such a person is so catastrophically unfit for public office.
In their warped minds masturbating over starving children, anal rape 'jokes', casual misogyny and homophobia, obsessing over the breasts of a minor, and efforts to rehabilitate eugenics are absolutely fine, and Toby Young is some kind of unfortunate martyr, and that's the ridiculous narrative these out-of-touch Tory boys club buffoons are actually running with!
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.
We've all seen how the Brextremists love to invoke "democracy" to attack anyone who dares to question Theresa May's fanatical hard-right interpretation of the Brexit vote, or the downright incompetence of her Brexiteer ministers.
"Will of the people" they howl whenever anyone tries to hold Theresa May to account, but the reality is that the Brextremists actually hate democracy.
Let's skip past the fact that they hurled abuse at the high court judges who ruled that parliament must have a democratic vote before Theresa May could invoke Article 50 because they hate democratic accountability and loathe the legal principle of parliamentary sovereignty.
Let's also bypass the fact that the Brextremists support Theresa May's plot to use Brexit as a Trojan Horse to allow her ministers to rewrite thousands of UK laws with no democratic scrutiny of their actions.
And let's also put aside the fact that a seething mob of Brextremists sent masses of abuse and death threats to the 11 'rebel' Tory MPs who voted with the opposition parties to ensure that parliament gets a democratic vote on the final Brexit deal.
Over the past year Brextremists have proven time and again that they thoroughly despise the workings of British democracy, but you're unlikely to convince ordinary Brexiters to think again by pointing out the Brextremists' proven track record of attacking and undermining parliamentary democracy. If the abuse and death threats of the Brextremist mob were going to turn public opinion against this extreme Tory interpretation of Brexit, then surely stuff like the disgusting "Enemies of the People" Daily Mail hatchet job on the three democracy-protecting high court judges would have been the tipping point?
There is however one way you can corner hardcore Brexiters into demonstrating that they actually hate and fear democracy, and that's by asking them about their views on a second EU referendum once the terms of the Brexit deal actually become clear.
Of course a minority of Brexiters will have sufficient principles and integrity to actually admit the obvious; that an EU referendum once the terms and conditions have been finalised would be much more meaningful than a referendum campaign so full of grandstanding, point-scoring, fearmongering, distortions, false promises, absurd fantasies, and outright lies, that discussion of the serious technicalities of the Brexit process were relegated to the absolute fringe of the debate.
The reaction of Brextremists to the idea of a second referendum once the terms and conditions of Brexit have been clarified is completely different. You can actually hear the fear in their voices when they're cornered into explaining their objections to a second referendum.
They're terrified that a referendum once the realities of Brexit have been made clear would give the British public a chance to step back from the cliff edge. They hate the idea of an informed second vote because they're so absolutely desperate to march us off the Brexit cliff, regardless of the consequences.
Aside from the fear of democracy producing a result they don't want to happen, there are also the absurd displays of mental gymnastics they're forced to perform in order to pretend that a vote before the terms and conditions of Brexit became clear is absolutely definitive and unquestionable, and that a democratic vote after the terms and conditions become clear is absolutely unconscionable.
They know that the Brexit vote was a freak outcome that is unlikely to be repeated, so they want 'democracy' to be permanently frozen on June 23rd 2016 forever.
But that's just not how democracy works, because in reality it's an ongoing process in which people are free to change their minds and their political allegiances based on new information (such as the actual terms of the Brexit deal, the £50 billion divorce bill that none of the Brexiters mentioned during the referendum debate, the exodus of UK-based businesses back into the Single Market, the lack of £350 per week for the NHS ...).
If democracy worked the way Brextremists want it to work, then we'd just have one General Election which would enshrine our government in perpetuity, because to hold new elections in light of new information would be to defy the "will of the people".
Brextremists clearly only respect democracy when they get what they want, and they absolutely loathe it when there's a possibility that their side might actually lose.
So they'll try to argue that a hastily conducted vote based on grandstanding, fearmongering, outright lies, and widespread ignorance of the actual consequences is democracy, and that an informed vote based on knowledge of the actual consequences would be some kind of sinister anti-democratic plot to undermine (their interpretation of) democracy.
So why not try it?
Try asking a Brexiter whether they believe that a vote based on ignorance of the actual consequences has more legitimacy than a vote once the actual consequences have been worked out and formalised, then watch the absurd displays of profoundly anti-democratic metal gymnastics begin.
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.
Ever since Jeremy Corbyn was elected as Labour Party leader in 2015 the mainstream media have worked tirelessly to create the narrative that Corbyn and Labour are scary political extremists, while the Tories are safe and sensible political moderates.
The problem of course is that this near constant mainstream media trope is a complete reversal of reality.
When it comes to party policy it's Labour who promote policies with lots of public support like reversing the ongoing Tory privatisation of the NHS (84%), renationalisation of the railways (60%) and Royal Mail (65%), and public ownership of the water companies (59%). Meanwhile it's the Tories that have been enacting radical hard-right policies with practically no public support like the mass privatisation of state schools (6%), privatisation of police services (3%), and privatisation of NHS services and facilities (10%). [source for percentages]
When it comes to other Labour policies like free university education, running the National Grid as a not for profit public service, and the establishment of a National Investment Bank, these are not radical or extreme policies at all, in fact they're actually commonplace across the developed world.
When it comes to party policies it's clear that Labour have some very popular ideas that are considered completely normal across the rest of the developed world, while it's the Tories who are intent on pushing a radical and extreme political agenda that has very little public support.
Aside from the mainstream media campaign to smear the Labour leadership and Labour policies as scary and extreme, there's also a concerted and ongoing effort to portray ordinary Labour Party members as a bunch of dangerously radical nutters with extreme ideas that are miles away from the political centre ground.
The problem of course is that this is another deliberate reality reversal by the mainstream media.
An in-depth survey of political party members by Queen Mary University and YouGov has demonstrated beyond doubt that Labour Party members largely share the same political territory as the Lib-Dems and the SNP, while it's Tory party members who hold the radical and extreme beliefs.
When it comes to attitudes on immigration Labour, Lib-Dem and SNP voters are clustered extremely closely together on the belief that immigration enriches British cultural life, while Tory members are the radical outliers who believe that immigration undermines Britain's cultural life.
When it comes to representation in parliament a clear majority of all of the other party members wanted to see more parliamentary representation for women, disabled people, the working class, ethnic minorities, young people, and the LGBT community.
Tory members were the only group where the majority don't want to see more parliamentary representation for women, disabled people, the working class, ethnic minorities, young people, and the LGBT community.
Presumably they don't want increased political representation for any of these groups because they're perfectly happy to be ruled over by an over-privileged elitist clique in which wealthy, white, able-bodied, older males are massively over-represented, and every other demographic is significantly under-represented.
When it comes to austerity dogma, Labour Party members have broadly similar views to the SNP and Lib-Dems that austerity has gone too far, while Tory party members are the fanatical extremists who still overwhelmingly support the demonstrably ruinous economic vandalism their beloved party has been inflicting on the nation for almost 8 years. Presumably they cling to their belief because to admit that it's been a failure now would be to admit their own role in damaging British society and the British economy, so it's easier for them to maintain their delusion than to just admit their mistake.
When it comes to a whole range of other subjects, from a second EU referendum once the actual terms of the deal are clear, through forcing school children to uncritically obey authority, to reintroduction of the death penalty, Labour members align closely with the views of SNP and Lib-Dem members, while it's the Tory members who hold the radical and extreme positions.
Whichever way we look at the situation, it's clear that the Tory party are actually the dangerous radicals.
Theresa May is a weak and directionless leader who threw away her majority and put herself at the mercy of some of the most extreme elements in British politics (the headbanger Tory hard-right, the ultra-nationalist blue-kip demographic who abandoned UKIP to prop up Theresa May's Tories, the DUP who she had to bribe into supporting her government, and the fanatically right-wing propaganda merchants like Rupert Murdoch, Paul Dacre, and the Barclay Brothers).
The Tory party have spent the last seven years imposing one radically right-wing and spectacularly unpopular policy after another. From trashing our local services to lavish huge tax breaks to corporations and the mega-rich, through their systematic abuse of sick and disabled people, to spectacularly unpopular privatisation scams. They're demonstrably a bunch of extremists with practically no regard for what the public actually want.
Then there's the actual Tory party members. What else can we say about this bunch of regressive, xenophobic, hard-right, anti-worker, elitist, homophobic, austerity-fetishists? Is it really any wonder the Tory party is so full of horrific politicians pushing grotesque policies given the absolute state of the Tory party membership?
So next time you see the mainstream media trying to portray Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party as the scary political extremists, just remember that they're deliberately reversing reality to confuse you, and that it's the Tories who rely on the bunch of regressive political deviants in the Tory party membership to help push their radically right-wing and highly unpopular policies.
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.
We all remember the outcry over the newly elected Labour MP Jared O'Mara, and his history of posting grotesque misogynistic and homophobic comments right?
We remember how the scandal was whipped up by the hard-right Guido Fawkes blog, and pushed hard by a load of grandstanding Tory MPs don't we?
We also remember that the Labour leadership were quick to suspend Jared O'Mara from the Labour Party over the scandal.
Well the Tories have triggered a scandal of their own by appointing the obnoxious right-wing polemicist Toby Young to lead their new Universities Watchdog.
Young already had a reputation as a person with very nasty views (he's written columns attacking equality legislation and disabled people, describing working class students at Oxford as "stains", and actively promoting eugenics), but this appointment inspired people to go back through his online comments to highlight all manner of vile and outrageous things he's spouted over the years.
These comments range from obsessing over the size of various women's breasts (including those of an underage girl), stating that he'd had his "dick up her arse" about Padma Lakshmi, accusing George Clooney of being "as queer as a coot", and describing Helen Mirren as a grandma he'd like to shag.
Young has subsequently tried to hide the evidence by deleting some 50,000 Tweets, but it's come far too late. If he'd had any sense at all he would have deleted them before applying for a public sector job, or maybe even considered not spewing vile sexist and homophobic comments all over Twitter in the first place.
Given the absolute stink the Guido Fawkes blog kicked up over Jared O'Mara, you would have thought they'd be keen to stick the boot into Toby Young over this scandal too, but somehow no!
Young has actually written a social media post vindicating himself, and thanking Guido Fawkes for the support they've given him!
Then there's the grandstanding Tory MPs who made such a fuss over Jared O'Mara's history of posting sick online comments. They're suddenly much less critical when it's one of their own who has been caught out spewing vile comments all over Twitter. In fact Boris Johnson has even tried to pass off Young's offensive stream of bile as "caustic wit"!
One of the most interesting things to consider is the fact that Jared O'Mara was hastily picked as a Labour candidate in a seat they didn't really expect to win because Theresa May called a snap election, denying Labour the time to conduct the kind of due diligence that would normally be expected.
When O'Mara's grim online comments history was discovered, he was quickly (and rightly) suspended from the party.
Now compare this with the Tory government's decision to overlook more qualified candidates to appoint Toby Young to their Universities Watchdog. They had plenty of time to carefully consider their decision, and to check that he was an appropriate candidate (by reading some of his blogs, or by looking through his Twitter feed for example).
Not only did the Tories fail to do their due diligence when they had plenty of time to do it, they're desperately retreating into defence mode now that his vile comments have been revealed, rather than admitting that a mistake has been made and that he's actually an entirely inappropriate person to have been awarded the supposedly impartial role he's been given.
If there's one thing that's even more glaring than the fact that a supposedly impartial role should never have been given to a vile hard-right polemicist like Toby Young, it's the absolute hypocrisy of the Tory Party (and the Guido Fawkes blog) for bitterly attacking Jared O'Mara for his vile online comments, and then desperately defending Toby Young when he's been caught out posting exactly the same kind of disgusting online abuse.
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.
It probably hasn't escaped your notice that Britain is facing its biggest and riskiest diplomatic challenge in decades in Brexit, as well as a catastrophic NHS crisis, and the ruinous economic legacies of almost eight years of toxic Tory austerity dogma and wage repression policies.
At such a crucial juncture it's incredibly vital that we have political leaders with the honesty to explain the seriousness of the situations we face, and the bravery to stand up to the challenge.
Unfortunately we have exactly the opposite. We're governed by a deceitful bunch of cowards.
The National Health Service has collapsed into its worst winter crisis in decades, with NHS England cancelling outpatient appointments and day case surgery, and deploying consultants to make up staff shortfalls in A&E units.
As this NHS meltdown is unfolding the Tory health secretary Jeremy Hunt is in hiding.
This latest display of cowardice from Hunt is hardly unusual. In May 2017 he hid from the public during the massive WannaCry cyber attack on the NHS, and he's spent the last two months pathetically hiding from the actor Ralf Little who challenged him to a public debate on the NHS back in early November.
Then there's the Tory transport minister Chris Grayling who is hiding in Qatar to avoid scrutiny of the astounding mess he's making of his brief (his successors are still desperately trying to clear up all the messes he created during his time as David Cameron's Justice Minister long after he was moved on in 2015).
UK rail commuters have experienced yet another fare hike of 3.4%, meaning that season ticket prices have increased by 50% since the Tories came to power in 2010, and against a backdrop of collapsing real terms wages too.
Then there's the astounding £2 billion bailout Grayling has handed to the Virgin/Stagecoach East Coast Franchise, allowing them to quit years early without paying what they owe the taxpayer under the terms of the contract they signed up to.
The recently departed chair of Theresa May's National Infrastructure Commission Andrew Adonis has called on Grayling to quit over his grubby deal with Virgin/Stagecoach, and challenged him to a public debate over the absolute mess he's making.
Grayling is hiding in Qatar.
This cowardice problem is clearly endemic within the Tory party, and it's pretty damned easy to see where it's stemming from.
During the 2017 general election Theresa May outright refused to debate Jeremy Corbyn, or any of her other political opponents. Her cowardice was so extreme that she even sent her recently bereaved subordinate Amber Rudd into a live debate to act as a human bullet shield for her.
It's no surprise at all that senior Tories think that they can get away with such brazen displays of cowardice, because they're simply following the example set by their own party leader.
Then there's the fact that Theresa May is even still in her job despite slinging away the Tory parliamentary majority with an astounding act of hubris and one of the worst general election campaigns in British political history.
The Tories know that she's a lame duck Prime Minister who is being forced to dance to the tune of the many of the most extreme influences in British politics (the headbanger Europhobes on the Tory hard-right; the DUP bigots she had to bribe into backing her government; right-wing propaganda barons like Rupert Murdoch and Paul Dacre; and the ever-so-fickle blue-kipper demographic who she's rendered herself completely dependent upon).
The entire Tory party knows that Theresa May is a weak and directionless leader with no room for manoeuvre, and that it's clearly against the national interest to go into the Brexit trade negotiations with such a spineless and compromised leader, but they have their own self-interest to think of.
They know that forcing Theresa May out as leader would massively increase the likelihood of another election, and of Jeremy Corbyn storming to victory with scores of Tory MPs losing their seats.
So the Tory cowards would rather keep their lame duck leader in power to the obvious detriment of the national interest, just so that they can keep their ministerial cars and salaries, and avoid the loss of dozens of Tory seats.
The question shouldn't really be why the Tories are such bunch of cowards, but why so many millions of British people are content to be ruled over by such a spineless, self-serving rabble.
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.
In September 2016 Theresa May gave a nauseatingly insincere speech in which she claimed that she wanted to turn Britain into "a place where advantage is based on merit not privilege; where it’s your talent and hard work that matter, not where you were born, who your parents are or what your accent sounds like".
Of course anyone with the most rudimentary understanding of the history of the Tory party, and Theresa May's own record in government will know that they've relentlessly attacked social mobility, and loaded the economic burden of their toxic austerity dogma onto those who can least afford to pay it, whilst lavishing vast handouts and tax cuts on the very wealthiest people in society.
The absurd decision to appoint the hard-right polemicist Toby Young as their new universities tsar just goes to prove how empty Theresa May's meritocracy speech actually was.
Not only is Toby Young completely unqualified for the role he's been appointed to (other than being relentlessly biased in favour of the Tory party), significantly more qualified candidates for the role have been swiftly rejected out of hand.
Take the case of the academic Nazir Afzal who is a former Chief Prosecutor, the pro-chancellor of one university, a director at two, and a visting lecturer at three more. He was rejected without an interview, with the job eventually going to the spectacularly unqualified Toby Young.
The highly qualified academic from a minority background is rejected out of hand in favour of the unqualified white guy who relentlessly propagandises for the Tory party. That's Theresa May's version of "meritocracy" in action.
It doesn't matter how qualified you are for the job, if there's some ridiculously unqualified lickspittle with connections in the Tory party who wants it, you might as well not bother.
This ludicrously anti-meritocratic appointment is yet another demonstration that Theresa May and the Tories are lying through their teeth whenever they talk about meritocracy.
Then there's also Toby Young's disgusting track record of spouting sneering elitist abuse to consider too.
Toby Young is an elitist snob who openly admitted that he only gained entry to Oxford University on a technicality* rather than on merit, who sneered at working class Oxford students who did get there on merit as "stains".
Toby Young is so obnoxious he described wheelchair ramps in schools as a "ghastly" policy and disabled students as "functionally illiterate troglodytes".
Toby Young is so biased in favour of the Tory Party that he smears Labour Party members as being as bad as the Britain First hate mob, but says nothing when serving Tory politicians get caught sharing vile extreme-right propaganda from Britain First and their ilk.
The University and College Union (UCU) summed up how inappropriate this ridiculous appointment is by saying that if the Tories' ne Universities watchdog was "to have any credibility it needed a robust board looking out for students’ interests. Instead we have this announcement sneaked out at new year with Tory cheerleader Toby Young dressed up as the voice of teachers and no representation of staff or students."
It just goes to show how out-of-touch the Tory party has become that they actually imagine that a spectacularly unqualified hard-right polemicist with extreme, obnoxious and incredibly right-wing biased views is the ideal candidate to impartially oversee our universities.
And it just goes to show how much contempt they have for the general public (you) that they think they can get away with making an appointment like this whilst lying through their teeth that they're actually in favour of meritocracy.
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* = Brasenose college Oxford sent him an acceptance letter by mistake, then his father, Lord Young badgered them into accepting him onto the course even though he'd failed to meet their entry requirements.
