Tag Archives: falsehood

Peter Hitchens is wrong to say Nazis were socialists; they were fascists. Have some facts

Not socialists: Hitler just put that word into the name of his party and stole some innocuous policies in order to fool working-class voters – much as many people who, today, say Nazis were socialists are trying to do.

I see Peter Hitchens is pushing the falsehood that Hitler’s Nazis were left-wing:

This is a lie that rears its head periodically. I wrote an article about it a few years ago that provides the facts. If you want them, read on:

‘Nazi’ is the short name. The full name for the ‘Nazi’ party was the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party” (“Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei” in German).

The fact that the far-right party contained ‘socialist’ in the name was a rebranding gambit to draw workers away from communism and into populist nationalism.

Despite this, the populist nationalists that support the likes of Donald Trump, regualarly take the oportunity to remind modern day liberal or left-leaning critics of white-supremacists and neo-nazis that ‘Socialism’ was included in the Nazi party name.

Hitler’s party positioned as a left-wing organisation based on his rhetoric, rather than his actions, espoused in the 1920s and 1930s to disenfranchised workers frustrated with what they perceived as a two-tier society.

Neither left or right wing want to be known as the side of the political spectrum that Hitler was on, and both sides would argue he was on the other, politically speaking.

One such incident occurred recently on Twitter.

Mike Stuchbery, a teacher and writer whose passion is History, sought to correct the misconception.

This is quite a long dressing down and is a little foulmouthed. You’ve been warned.

https://twitter.com/MikeStuchbery_/status/898264524536414208

The above was from an article I published in 2017.

I wonder how long I’ll have to wait before publishing it again?


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NHS dentists: Is Rishi Sunak trying to usurp Boris Johnson’s reputation for lying?

Rishi Sunak: rebuilding public DIStrust of the Conservative government.

UK prime minister Rishi Sunak has been caught out telling a falsehood to his fellow MPs.

Didn’t he claim he was going to rebuild public trust in the government, when he became PM last year?

This isn’t going to achieve that aim.

During Prime Minister’s Questions on January 11 – the first PMQs of the year, he claimed:

  • There are more NHS dentists across the UK.
  • There is more funding for NHS dentists.
  • This means people are getting the treatment they need.

It seems none of these claims are true.

Cat Smith, Labour MP for Lancaster and Fleetwood, who highlighted concerns that people are unable to get an NHS dental appointment, has written to Sunak, calling on him to correct the record:

She wrote: “The British Dental Association (BDA) has said that not one of these claims are accurate, and described this as a ‘wholesale misrepresentation’ of the crisis facing NHS dentistry.”

She continued: “The Chair of the BDA, Eddie Crouch, has said ‘The Prime Minister has offered a grotesque misrepresentation of a crisis facing millions. Our patients are living with the reality. The facts are there are no new dentists, no new contract and no new money. All we’ve seen are tweaks at the margins. We need honesty, ambition and investment to save a service on its last legs.”

And she urged him to correct the record.

At the time of writing, he has yet to do so.

ADDITIONAL: The British Dental Association has also urged Sunak to correct the record after Labour/Co-operative MP Simon Lightwood raised the same issue:

And Peter Stefanovic has made this short clip to show Sunak how to do it:

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Can you believe this Tory is still pushing the ’40 new hospitals’ lie?

Conservative MP Lucy Frazer tried to push the old Boris Johnson lie that 40 new hospitals are being built, during BBC Question Time on Thursday (October 27).

Maximilien Robespierre discusses it here:

The issue is that, if it had been a straight interview between Frazer and a BBC journalist, she would have got away with her lie. It was only because Julia Hartley-Brewer, of all people, called her out that she didn’t.

Standards of broadcast journalism have clearly fallen very low for that to be allowed to happen.

And her attitude when caught out was that people shouldn’t get angry about the fact that she lied!

Of course we should be angry. She is an elected politician; we expect her to be truthful with us.

Hopefully she’ll lose her Parliamentary seat at the next election but This Writer won’t be holding his breath waiting for that to happen. People vote for the party they support and/or the leader they like, rather than the individual drone who’s actually up to take their local seat.

It’s a shame. If we all put a little more thought into what our votes support, Westminster could be a very different place.

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

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Truss ends her time as prime minister with a speech full of falsehoods

Last words: Liz Truss delivers her final speech as UK prime minister. What a shame so much of it was untrue.

Typical. You have to spend a day seeing to family matters and everything kicks off at work.

This Writer was away from his desk on Tuesday (October 25) – so of course it was the day Liz Truss finally gave up being the prime minister, Rishi Sunak took over, and he went on to form a new cabinet of halfwits.

I missed the lot. Forgive me for playing catch-up now.

We’ll start with Truss’s final speech as prime minister. Here it is in its full, awkward glory:

Here’s that speech with a bit of fact-checking from Politics Joe:

Personally, I love the bit where she mentions “the philosophicer Sene…ca”. Was that bit written for her by someone else? Has she ever read Seneca? (I’ll admit I haven’t.)

She said her government had acted “urgently and decisively on the side of hard-working families and businesses” – but the headlines showed that the UK economy is expected to be weak until 2024, with rising costs hitting households and companies.

Also shown was a headline stating that a primary school running a foodbank said people are struggling hugely. Another said “toast is a luxury” and families have “never been more scared” over where money will come from. And a third said one-fifth of households are considering cancelling their Christmas celebration – with many considering loans to get them through the festive season, due to the cost-of-living crisis that Truss did nothing to ease.

Businesses stated that her energy assistance plan was no good, and her mini-budget caused political and market turmoil.

She said her government had “helped millions of households with their energy bills” – but headlines indicated that families were still struggling after energy bills skyrocketed from £74 to more than £1,300.

She said her government had “helped thousands of businesses avoid bankruptcy” – but headlines said supply and staffing issues, inflation and high energy bills meant the UK hospitality industry alone was expecting a “tidal wave” of closures.

“We are taking back our energy independence,” she said, “so we are never again beholden to global market fluctuations or malign foreign powers.

Firstly, let’s take a moment to remind ourselves that Tory governments of the past were warned about the dangers of allowing power over our energy supply to pass to foreign owners – and ignored those warnings.

Now, let’s look at the headlines, which stated that the whole UK electricity system is under private ownership due to Tory privatisation in 1989, and its dependency on imports has increased in the decades since (after being more or less self-sufficient previously).

“We simply cannot afford to be a low-growth country where the government takes up an increasing share of our national wealth,” she said, expanding on this later in her speech by saying, “It means lower taxes, so people can keep more of what they earn”. But the headlines contradicted her, showing that the International Monetary Fund had openly criticised her tax plans, adding that Jeremy Hunt, as Chancellor, has reversed her income tax breaks along with almost all other measures from the disastrous mini-budget of September 23.

She spoke about “restoring power to democratic institutions” and said “we must be able to out-compete autocratic regimes where power lies in the hands of a few” – ignoring the fact that “Rishi Sunak’s coronation as PM would shame a banana republic” because he was elected by fewer than 200 people – all of them Tory MPs. Another headline highlighted Sunak’s “lack of mandate”.

“And it means delivering growth that will lead to more job security, higher wages, and greater opportunities for our children and grandchildren,” she said. But figures show that “under-30s lost more than 20 per cent of disposable income in the last 12 months”, blaming rising energy prices.

So almost everything she said in her speech was contradicted by the facts.

Thank goodness she has gone. Can you imagine having to put up with two more years of this ridiculous, easily-dismissed doubletalk?

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

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Liz Truss didn’t lie about being the first PM from a comprehensive school. She’s just lazy

That’s not a good quality for a prime minister to have!

Thanks should go to Professor Tim Wilson for unearthing the facts that Liz Truss is not the first UK prime minister to come from a comprehensive school background.

Theresa May went to Wheatley Park Comprehensive School (although it had been a grammar school previously), and Gordon Brown attended Kirkaldy High School, also a comprehensive.

Prof Wilson suggests that this should not be held as an example of Truss lying; instead, we should see it as proof that she doesn’t do her research properly and is merely lazy:

Sadly, this could be seen as an example of a classic Tory tactic: the double-bind.

If she succeeds at her job, they’ll say what a great example she is, coming from such a disadvantaged background that she had to go to a comprehensive.

If she fails, they’ll say it was because she went to a comprehensive and the education system needs overhauling to bring in private education providers and end this blight on our children.

It’s what they usually do – right?

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Someone tell Therese Coffey: two-week target to see GPs is in place ALREADY

Coffey and liquor: this is the Tory minister who reckons she’s going to get the NHS back on track.

This is more smoke and mirrors from the Liz Truss Tory government.

Health Secretary Therese Coffey has announced a plan to improve access to GPs, with a target for everyone making an appointment to be seen within two weeks.

But that is the target at the moment:

Note that the David Cameron Coalition government reduced the target to this from Labour’s earlier target of just two days, back in 2010.

It seems likely the move was intended to pre-empt an expected worsening of services when Andrew Lansley brought private, profit-making healty companies into the NHS in his bid to turn it into a cash cow for extremely wealthy shareholders.

No wonder GP leaders are saying the announcement will have “minimal impact”.

So let’s have one more tweet to sum up the situation:

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Way NOT to Work; it’s claimed Boris Johnson’s flagship jobs scheme was rubbish

Boris Johnson: has he been lying AGAIN?

It seems a scheme launched by Boris Johnson to force people into work by cutting their benefits after four weeks actually saw fewer people into jobs than the average.

The target set for the Way to Work scheme was to get 500,000 people into jobs, and the Department for Work and Pensions made a huge “We did it!” announcement five months after the scheme was launched in January.

But this seems to be untrue:

Figures from the Office for National Statistics released last week show that the number of unemployed people finding work actually fell by 148,000 compared with the six months before Way to Work began, despite record numbers of job vacancies.

The government is also facing questions about why it set a target of 500,000 when, on average, nearly 1 million unemployed people have found work during similar periods each year since 2001.

At the end of January, Johnson announced that a “Way to Work drive” would help 500,000 into employment from Universal Credit intensive work search or jobseeker’s allowance, at a time when there were a record 1.2 million vacancies.

Analysis by the Observer of seasonally adjusted figures from the ONS Labour Force Survey shows that 867,310 people moved from unemployment to employment from January to June, with the majority of them finding work before March. In the previous six months, 1,015,954 people moved into work. The average figure for January to June since records began in 2001 is 948,000.

The DWP has doubled down, claiming that Way to Work did successfully support half a million people into work.

A spokesperson said there had been fewer unemployed people overall in the labour market, so the amount of people moving from unemployed to employed was understandably lower.

But the Office for Statistics Regulation has warned that there is no clear explanation of how the Way to Work target was defined, how it would be measured, and the methods used to support claims that the target had been reached.

It said measuring government programmes in a robust and transparent way is important, and the statistics and data underpinning any measurement should uphold principles of being trustworthy, of high quality and offer public value – but the way the Department has communicated information in this case does not uphold these principles.

Stephen Timms, Labour chair of the work and pensions select committee, was quoted by The Guardian, saying the committee would be looking at the figures as part of an inquiry when MPs return in the autumn.

“The refusal to set out the evidence behind the claim, unfortunately, is par for the course at the moment… To claim that their policy has been a success seems like business as usual. There might be something more that we’re missing. If there is, they need to tell us what it is.”

It seems that, even though he is quitting as prime minister, Boris Johnson’s falsehoods will continue to plague us for some time to come.

Source: Boris Johnson’s flagship jobs scheme was a failure, new figures reveal

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Boris Johnson’s conference speech: the lies, the bluster and the ridicule

This man knew, for one: Andrew Marr called out Boris Johnson on his false claims on the morning the Conservative conference began. In response, it seems Johnson doubled down, determined to dupe us with even more falsehoods than ever.

Did you watch Boris Johnson’s speech to the Tory conference last week? I didn’t.

I knew I would be able to get the gist from other sources later. And the satirical alternatives are so much more fun. For example:

For a more factual analysis, we may turn to the ever-reliable Peter Stefanovic:

With the benefit of fact checking, it’s now possible to go into Johnson’s false claims in more depth – if you have the stomach for it!

Let’s start with his misleading claim that the rollout of a vaccine for Covid-19 was only possible due to the greedy capitalist system, and to Brexit:

So his claims about the vaccines were lies. Happy? We’ll move on.

Let’s look at that analysis, starting with “We now have the fastest growth in the G7“.

The G7 is a group of big economies. If you compare GDP between April and June 2021 with the last three months of 2019, before the pandemic hit, the UK had the joint-fifth best growth in the G7, equal with Germany, and with only Italy doing worse.

So: not true.

How about “48 new hospitals, 50,000 more nurses“?

So far, construction has begun at six sites. One is a new cancer centre on an existing hospital site in Bath. The other five were hospital builds planned under pre-existing schemes (over the last decade) and include building work that stopped after the collapse of the construction firm Carillion.

Another lie, then.

The Conservatives promised 50,000 more nurses for England by March 2025. The latest figures show there were 310,251 full-time equivalent NHS nurses and health visitors in June 2021. While that is up 14,158 since December 2019, it still leaves 35,842 full-time equivalent posts to fill over the next three-and-a-half years.

Not going to make it, are they?

Let’s move on to “We have done 68 free trade deals, and that great free trade deal with our friends in the EU“.

Nearly all of these deals – 63 of them in fact – are “rollover” deals. That means they copied the terms of deals the UK already had when it was an EU member, rather than creating any new benefits.

So the actual number of new trade deals is five. And all of those apart from the one with Australia are only slightly changed from the EU deals they replaced.

By far the most important agreement – the one with the EU itself – creates additional barriers to trade which were not there when the UK was part of the EU single market, particularly for services. And the big Brexit hope of an early free trade deal with the United States has not been fulfilled.

Nor is it likely to be, while one of the additional barriers – connected with Northern Ireland – continues to threaten peace in the province. Johnson is doing nothing about that.

There was a ‘wild card’ attack on the Labour Party: “What’s Labour’s answer [to drug dealing] by the way? To decriminalise hard drugs apparently – to let the dealers off with a caution.

Was it true? No.

The suggestion that Labour has a policy to decriminalise hard drugs is not true. The party has confirmed that it does not support this.

Finally, the big lie that Johnson keeps harping on about: “Wages are going up faster than before the pandemic began.”

They aren’t:

Since average salaries dipped in the first few months of the pandemic, comparing this July with last July looks like a record rise – but more because of lows back then than highs right now.

And rising inflation, meaning the cost of pretty much everything is increasing at a rate that outstrips Johnson’s claims about wage rises, mean that his talk is even more nonsense jabbering than usual; every day we are becoming less able to pay for the services we need.

The claims about wages struck a nerve in the general public, many of whom remember the contempt with which Johnson responded to NHS workers’ requests for a pay rise, after expressing such fake-heartfelt gratitude to them for their work fighting Covid-19:

But it didn’t stop there. Here’s a good question for every employee in the UK:

And now let’s have some facts. First this:

And now this:

One final note on the speech: He said he would “unleash the spirit of Britain” – a claim that was too rich for our wits to let lie:

And yes – he deserved both of those barbs.

The speech encouraged one commenter, Richard Haviland, to describe a series of “defining principles” of Johnson’s governing technique. Here they are:

Okay, I added a couple of comments on his list because I consider them insightful.

Speech? Johnson’s oration was a pack of lies from beginning to end!

The good news is we may soon see movements to curb Johnson’s insistence on lying to Parliament – and an end to the lies spoken by his ministers there as well – in spite of the reluctance of Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle to rock the boat:

At the very least, such a debate will throw a spotlight on many of the hundreds of lies (according to respected right-wing journalist Peter Oborne) spoken by Johnson to Parliament since he became prime minister in mid-2019 – in line with Hoyle’s demand that such claims be part of a dedicated debate.

He may then face pressure to enforce existing conventions on Parliamentary liars – or to devise new penalties. And then we’ll get to watch Johnson falling foul of them every Wednesday lunchtime.

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

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Atkins falsehoods are quietly edited out of Hansard. Will she now be dragged to the Commons to apologise?

Speaker: Lindsay Hoyle in action. He looks fierce in this image – but will he be quite so fierce in defending the reputation of the House of Commons, that Victoria Atkins has so casually besmirched?

After This Site highlighted the fact that the official record of Parliamentary proceedings had been ‘doctored’ to misrepresent Home Office minister Victoria Atkins’s smear against Jeremy Corbyn, we learn today that it has been quietly edited again.

Now the record presents her words as she said them, as this tweet from Leftworks shows:

Sadly, this has been done without a word of apology or explanation from the authorities, and this is not acceptable.

Furthermore, Atkins’s speech means she knowingly lied to Parliament – she misrepresented Jeremy Corbyn as a racist, wrongly using the EHRC investigation of the Labour Party as supporting evidence.

Lying to Parliament is a serious offence, and it is also considered extremely poor behaviour to accuse another member of Parliament in the way Ms Atkins has.

She should be dragged back to the Commons to apologise for her speech and explain why she thought it was acceptable to lie that Jeremy Corbyn was a racist in the same debate where she defended Boris Johnson, the prime minister, against the same charge, despite the many known occasions where he has exhibited such behaviour.

I have written to Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle to that effect. Here’s the text of my letter:

I published an article on my website Vox Political yesterday, referring to surreptitious editing of Hansard to misrepresent the debate on the Urgent Question about racism in the social media, in the Commons on July 14.

In that debate, Home Office minister Victoria Atkins stated, “I remind the House of the findings of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission under his [Jeremy Corbyn’s] watch: Labour ‘unlawfully discriminated against, harassed or victimised people because they are Jewish’.”

This was edited in Hansard with three words added as follows (I have capitalised them for ease of identification): “I remind the House of the findings of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission under his [Jeremy Corbyn’s] watch, TO DETERMINE WHETHER Labour ‘unlawfully discriminated against, harassed or victimised people because they are Jewish’.”

In the debate, Ms Atkins went on to say, “I will listen to many people about tackling racism and I will work with pretty much anyone, but I will take a long spoon with which to sup with this particular member.”

The effect of her speech as a whole was to falsely present Mr Corbyn, a lifelong campaigner against racism and discrimination of any kind – as I am sure you, being a Labour Party member, are awre – as a racist.

The effect of the editing of Hansard was to corruptly mitigate that falsehood in the record, making it seem she said Labour was only investigated by the EHRC when in fact she presented Labour, and Corbyn, as having been found to have committed the offence stated.

I notice that Hansard has now been surreptitiously edited for a second time, with the offending words removed. I welcome this, although I believe the people of the UK deserve an explanation as to why the falsehoods appeared in the official record in the first place. In fact, I am writing to demand one. How many other falsehoods have been edited into Hansard, unnoticed?

Additionally, the new version makes Ms Atkins’s false claim against Mr Corbyn clear again. It is unacceptable and hypocritical for a UK government minister, who defended the prime minister against allegations of racism in the face of documented historical records of it, to also falsely accuse a former Labour leader of racism in the way she has.

In addition to my demand for an explanation of the editing-in of falsehoods into Hansard, I am therefore also writing to demand that Ms Atkins be brought back to the Commons to apologise for smearing another member of Parliament in the despicable way she has.

Let me make myself clear: I am not requesting these things – I am demanding them. Ms Atkins’s behaviour has seriously harmed the reputation of the House of Commons and if you fail to act, that institution will suffer further reputational harm.

I await your confirmation that you will comply with my wishes and look forward to seeing them carried out.

I don’t expect Hoyle to comply with my demands.

Like all tribes, MPs tend to stick together when they perceive they are being attacked by someone else.

But he knows that this offence has been seen, and he’ll have to record that he received a complaint about it.

Whatever happens next, I think we should all follow some of the prime minister’s advice, and be vigilant.

Let’s make it clear to our MPs that we’re sick of their antics. They were elected to represent us in a responsible way – not to engage in playground insults and lie about it afterwards.

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/mike-sivier-libel-fight/


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WHY YOU NEED ME: Johnson’s government is out of control and the mass media are his cheerleaders

It’s not just Vox Political that you need – any social media commentary site that actually criticises the government rather than acting as its stenographer will do.

Professor Simon Wren-Lewis has put the situation in a nutshell with his own latest blogpost on Mainly Macro.

He states that Boris Johnson’s dictatorship is beyond Parliamentary control, and he has the mainstream media in his pocket.

He uses the decision to cut aid funding to foreign countries from 0.7 per cent of GDP to 0.5 per cent as an example:

A large number of Conservative MPs were unhappy with this, and wanted to use parliament to reverse this cut. The parliament’s speaker ruled their attempt invalid, but requested the government to allow a vote on the issue. The government refused.

The executive increasingly views parliament with contempt.

We knew this government thought little of parliamentary sovereignty when it closed it down, illegally, before the last election. The courts forced it to retract that measure, so now the government is intending to pass laws that would prevent the courts doing so again.

Of course, Parliament could pass a motion of “no confidence” in this dictatorship – but Prof Wren-Lewis rightly points out that “that is never going to happen while Johnson looks like winning the next election. As a result, parliament has no effective control over what this government does.”

Yes, it’s corrupt. But it’s the system we have.

Prof Wren-Lewis goes on to mention a series of scandals involving Johnson’s ministers: Michael Gove, Matt Hancock, Gavin Williamson, Priti Patel, and Robert Jenrick.

Did he sack any of those ministers for corruption and dishonesty? Of course not – and Prof Wren-Lewis puts his finger on the reason: “They are his people, and nothing bad is going to come from keeping the ministers he chose in the job… The key is that this government is totally unaccountable, and does just what it likes.”

And the reason it can do what it likes – more than any other – is the fact that Johnson controls the UK’s mass media. And that means he can control what you think about him:

For a large part of the press, Johnson is their Prime Minister. They became propaganda outlets to persuade people to vote for Brexit, and they have remained propaganda outlets supporting the government ever since.

The extent to which the right wing press has become the propaganda arm of the right in the Tory party has steadily increased over the last few decades.

Prof Wren-Lewis rightly narrows his focus down to the BBC. The corporation has a huge, 70 per cent, share of the current affairs information that gets into your home and into your head:

The big change, begun by Thatcher and Cameron and completed by Johnson, is to tame the BBC. This is hardly surprising, when party donors are appointed to key positions and the government keeps attacking the BBC’s outputs, income and even its existence.

The BBC does not push propaganda, but they do not take it on either, giving the press a largely open field for their propaganda to work.

They avoid the truth if it embarrasses the government, and when its reporters do tell things straight, they are put down by the BBC’s leadership.

Because of the way the BBC fails in its reporting, even things that do have a large impact on voters, like tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths, will never be described in those terms.

That lack of media accountability allows Johnson to ignore his scientists, and put personal ‘freedom’ above saving lives and the economy. This is what happens when the government becomes unaccountable. It is allowed to make mistakes costing lives, and pays no price for these mistakes.

What does this mean for you – the news viewer/reader and voter?

See for yourself:

The only accountability that has any influence on this government is the electorate. But because of its natural advantage in the media, and unfortunately an opposition that seems pretty ineffective beyond PMQs, that influence on the government is partial and weak.

Issues most voters will not notice, because their only sight of them is a news item towards the end of a bulletin (like the government breaking the law on contracts), can be safely ignored by the government.

That means your attention is diverted away from criticism of the Johnson government’s many failings.

You are told that everything is running swimmingly by the government’s front man, whose upbeat turn of phrase and mop of deliberately-messy blond hair hides his “duper’s delight” smile that says he is lying to you.

You believe him when he tells you the vaccination programme is keeping you safe, even though cases of Delta Variant Covid-19 infections are skyrocketing.

You don’t believe he has screwed up the economy with his duff Brexit trade deals, or that he has jeopardised the peace in Northern Ireland, or any number of other idiocies for which he is responsible – because you simply don’t know about them.

That’s where I come in.

Vox Political has provided consistent criticism of the UK’s politicians for very nearly 10 years.

That means when Daniel Kawczynski apologised for bullying, I was able to put it in context and point out it is not a minor incident.

It means when Priti Patel supports football fans who boo protests against racism, I can point out all the incidents in her career that show she is a racist too.

It means I can highlight Tory corruption whenever it surfaces.

And that means the UK’s electorate should be reading Vox Political – right?

But only a tiny fraction of the politically-oriented public does – because the mass media ignore the work done here (for obvious reasons – they support the Tories and don’t want to publicise anybody who doesn’t) and the social media platforms push sites like this one down your newsfeeds so you don’t realise we’re here.

The ultimate aim is to starve us out of business so there’s nobody left to object when they spoonfeed you their Tory-approved falsehoods, anaesthetising you into supporting Johnson’s crowd while they strip you of all the hard-won freedoms your ancestors gained over the last hundred years and more.

As I say, Vox Political isn’t the only critical social media site available. But times have been hard over the year (and more) of Covid-19. Readerships have fallen and some of us are in danger.

So, please do yourself – and everybody you know – a favour.

Give us a boost, every chance you get.

Promote us to your friends and family members when we highlight the facts that contrast so strongly with the fairy stories you see on the BBC News.

The only way to change people’s minds is one at a time – but that can’t happen if everybody is ignoring the facts and turning down the chance to explain them.

Source: mainly macro: A government out of control