Cognitive dissonance – as I’m sure most people know – is the condition of holding two opposing beliefs and attitudes simultaneously.
From his behaviour, we can conclude that Tory Tom Hunt holds very similar political views to those of Suella Braverman.
From his words, we may conclude that he does not understand that those views are held by people in the extreme right wing of his party.
His outburst on the BBC’s Politics Live on Monday derives from this incongruity, as Maximilien Robespierre explains:
Robespierre also draws attention to the inconsistencies in Hunt’s own words: surveys of the UK population are supposed to show that they support Braverman, meaning people have spoken up to say this – but it is also the “silent majority” who support her. Which is it, then?
And of course Hunt is wrong in the premise on which he bases his indignation. Labour’s Steve Reed wasn’t saying that Braverman belongs to the extreme right wing of politics; just to the extreme right wing of the Conservative Party.
In that, Reed was correct. Hunt was pushing a false, straw man argument by trying to suggest that Reed was saying one thing when in fact he was saying the other.
He probably thought he was being clever but came across as precisely the opposite.
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New Tory prime minister Liz Truss is nothing more than a piece of theatre, according to Guardian columnist George Monbiot in this Democracy Now! interview.
He says her every utterance is carefully rehearsed in order to say only what she thinks is popular – and the same goes for her policies; she adopts whatever policy she thinks will find favour with the audience she’s with.
The audience she has been with over the summer has been the Conservative Party membership – a grossly unrepresentative and tiny group of UK people.
In pandering to these people, she has supported extreme neoliberal policies – tax cuts for the rich, more austerity, more privatisation if possible, and all when the exact opposite is needed.
Watch:
Her second week in power is about to begin.
Feel free to check Mr Monbiot’s predictions against what Truss does.
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In Liz we DON’T Truss (it’s a play on her campaign slogan, which is itself a play on words): she’ll end your right to free speech, and to campaign for fair pay and decent working conditions.
Tory leadership contender Liz Truss vowed to clamp down on free speech and protest after being interrupted by critics of her police on climate change.
Her speech at a hustings in the Winter Gardens at Eastbourne was halted when six activists from Green New Deal Rising loudly criticised her:
In response, Truss said: “Can I just say a few words on the militant people who try and disrupt our country, and who try and disrupt our democratic process, and who try and disrupt our essential services?
“I would legislate immediately to make sure that we are standing up to militant trade unions who stop ordinary commuters getting into work, and I would legislate to protect our essential services.
“And I will make sure that militant activists such as Extinction Rebellion are not able to disrupt ordinary people who work hard and do the right thing and go into work.”
If you think that sounds good, think again.
Truss was saying she would remove your right to free speech and rescind your right to demand acceptable pay and benefits at work.
You may be happy that other people will be stopped from disrupting your day, but will you be as happy when you have a serious issue of your own and get arrested for trying to raise it?
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Taking the knee: Starmer and Rayner claimed it was in solidarity with victims of racist prejudice but it seems more likely they were going to follow up the gesture by drawing weapons and taking aim at the same victims.
I wonder how all those new, allegedly-genuine, Labour members feel about the policies and viewpoints they claim to adore being dissected and destroyed on live TV?
That’s what happened on Monday (February 21) on the BBC’s Politics Live. We can go through the content in a moment but let’s hear it first:
First up: Angela Rayner’s support for the murder of people accused of terrorism.
In fairness, her comment was, “Shoot terrorists and ask questions later.” It suggests she means genuine terrorists deserve to be shot, rather than people like Jean Charles de Menezes who was wrongly identified as a suspect by the Metropolitan Police – who shot him anyway.
But how do you identify who is a genuine terrorist and who is innocent – especially in an emergency?
That’s why Rayner’s comment was so dangerous, and why people like Sonali Bhattacharyya are right to be scandalised by her advocacy of it. She claimed to be “soft left” but seems to be more “hard right” as far as this is concerned.
Cressida Dick is mentioned because she was the senior Met Police officer in the operation that led to his fatal shooting.
Ms Bhattacharyya’s observation that Rayner’s words seem like posturing for the right-wing press is right on the button – especially at a time when Starmer Labour is trying hard to create a false distinction between it and the party as led by Jeremy Corbyn by saying he was (seen to be) soft on crime.
He wasn’t; Blairites such as Starmer like to make the claim, though. It harks back to Tony Blair’s attack on the Conservatives, back in the mid-1990s, and his 1993 slogan, “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.”
Anyone can see that this focused on rehabilitation as much as on punishment, but Starmer’s crowd has chosen to ignore the former in order to appeal to readers of right-wing low-intelligence tabloids.
Shadow Skills Minister Toby Perkins tried to laugh it off. He pointed out that Rayner’s comments were made on Matt Forde’s political comedy podcast. But this is not a laughing matter. Is it?
It’s very telling that at one point he said, “I think what Angela Rayner was trying to get away with-” before catching himself and rephrasing. So she was trying to get away with a claim about Labour’s attitude to terrorism, was she? Moments before, she had been making a humorous comment about her own, personal, attitude. Which was it? I couldn’t be both!
The weird part of that is, Labour’s attitude to terrorism really isn’t different now from its attitude under Jeremy Corbyn. There has been no policy change.
Ms Bhattacharyya went on to point out the apparent hypocrisy of Starmer Labour’s new attitude. Having taken the knee in support of Black Lives Matter protests, Rayner is now apparently saying she would prefer it if people like George Floyd (whose death prompted them) were murdered by police as a matter of course.
She might have said it humorously on a comedy podcast but if Mr Perkins is trying to use it to justify Labour’s claim to be tougher on crime than Corbyn, then she was also putting it forward as a genuine expression of policy direction. That’s hypocritical and Starmer himself needs to straighten out this tangle.
Next, host Jo Coburn made matters worse for Starmer by pointing out that, after being elected Labour leader on a “continuity Corbyn” platform, he has ditched all the promises he made.
Ailbhe Rea of New Statesman agreed that Starmer appealed to the left to take the leadership and was now going to “run to the centre” in his bid to become prime minister – in the belief that he has to do so in order to be electable.
Her claim that Starmer and his people are comfortable with making comments like Rayner’s because they “hope their voters/members who are less comfortable with that will know that it’s not fundamentally what they mean”. So, definitely hypocrites, then. Now the claim appeared to be that they had said they want to shoot people accused of terrorism but didn’t mean it. This story twists like a snake – which is what the Labour-representing participants are starting to resemble.
Asked to comment about the new attitude to crime in relation to Labour’s 2019 manifesto, Mr Perkins dug himself deeper into a hole by referring to the election result as the worst defeat the party had suffered since the 1930s – ignoring the fact that more people voted for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour than for Ed Miliband in 2015, Gordon Brown in 2010 or Tony Blair in 2005. Corbyn’s 2017 vote count was larger than Blair’s in 2001. In fact, the only time a Labour leader in the last 30 years has earned more votes than Mr Corbyn was 1997.
So when we hear Starmer say “a vote for him is a change of direction”, we hear a political leader determined to haemorrhage votes.
Ms Bhattacharyya had the perfect counter for Mr Perkins, simply by pointing out that Starmer was elected leader on his 10 pledges to continue Corbyn policies – policies that Mr Perkins had just rubbished.
And Mr Perkins then claimed that Starmer’s leadership offer was to say that the Corbyn manifesto of 2019 was “unrealistic in its totality”.
So, Starmer was elected Labour leader on a promise to continue policies that he was also saying were “unrealistic” in their “totality”. Nobody should buy that.
Jo Coburn re-inserted herself to draw attention to an opinion poll that shows Labour ahead of the Tories on issues including the economy, crime and immigration – trailing only on Covid-19 (because Starmer has supported Boris Johnson to the disastrous hilt, perhaps).
Asked to comment, old Tory Ann Widdecombe agreed that Starmer is trying to get away from left-wing Corbynism but said his problem is that much of Labour membership and support is left-wing and Corbynist, and aligning with them makes him “unelectable”.
But is it?
Labour nearly lost its de facto control of Bristol City Council on February 17 when the Green Party candidate in the Southmead by-election came within a few dozen votes of taking the seat.
Turnout was just 21.2 per cent, though – in a ward with considerable poverty. And it’s not the usual by-election apathy – in the 2019 general election, 47 per cent of the poorest people didn’t vote.
So Labour’s electoral victory isn’t conditional on appealing to an ever-diminishing crowd of right-wingers.
It should be considered conditional on enticing an increasingly-disillusioned – and growing – population of the UK’s poorest citizens into voting for the party.
Starmer isn’t going to do that – ever. And certainly not by pandering to bloodthirsty fascists.
If you’re a Twitter user who has ever wondered why the fascists seem to get more space on that platform, now you know the answer: Twitter’s computerised rules demand it.
Twitter casually admitting that their algorithm amplifies the political right far more than the left, in all countries measured except Germany. https://t.co/2ngStvdzWJ
Twitter has admitted it amplifies more tweets from rightwing politicians and news outlets than content from leftwing sources.
The social media platform examined tweets from elected officials in seven countries – the UK, US, Canada, France, Germany, Spain and Japan. It also studied whether political content from news organisations was amplified on Twitter.
The research found that in six out of seven countries, apart from Germany, tweets from rightwing politicians received more amplification from the algorithm than those from the left; right-leaning news organisations were more amplified than those on the left; and generally politicians’ tweets were more amplified by an algorithmic timeline than by the chronological timeline.
Under the research, a value of 0% meant tweets reached the same number of users on the algorithm-tailored timeline as on its chronological counterpart, whereas a value of 100% meant tweets achieved double the reach.
On this basis, the UK suffered the second-strongest discrepancy between right and left (behind Canada) – although some might think that Labour (112%) is currently even more right-wing than the Conservatives (176%) meaning the results are skewed by the lack of information about left-wing organisations here.
The findings indicate problems for Twitter because they suggest that right-wing tweets get preferential treatment as a function of the way the algorithm is constructed.
The good news is that Twitter has indicated it may need to change its algorithm to give left-wing tweets a wider – and more equal – audience.
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“Little despot” Priti Patel is attacking “some of the most basic democratic rights of citizens” in her plan to restrict UK citizens’ fundamental right to protest, it’s being claimed.
She is facing revolt against her planned law as the Policing Bill enters the House of Lords this week.
And more than 350 organisations, including human rights groups, charities and faith bodies, have written to Patel and justice secretary Robert Buckland to say that the measures would have a “profound impact” on freedom of expression, and are “an attack on some of the most basic democratic rights of citizens”.
Peers are likely to make amendments to the Bill before it goes back to the House of Commons, triggering a potential confrontation with MPs.
But the hardline Patel may be defeated if enough Conservative MPs join a rebellion.
Former Labour Home Secretary Lord David Blunkett said the Bill would stop people from protesting over issues like planning proposals, fracking or other topical items against which they have every right to express opposition.
And he said if the Bill is intended to stop people with political agendas from using the right to protest for their own ends, then it does not achieve that goal.
He said other ways of dealing with such behaviour already exist.
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Sadiq Khan said unflattering things about then-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn after his 2016 London mayoral victory. But at least Corbyn provided Labour policies for the public to support in the poll. Starmer put him in a vacuum and it is a miracle he received as many votes as he did.
Belated congratulations to Sadiq Khan on his re-election to the London Mayoralty.
But isn’t it disturbing that he won by a narrower margin than against Zac Goldsmith in 2016, against an equally inept candidate?
In the years preceding the election, Bailey had been criticised for racism (calling Khan “the Mad Mullah of Londonistan”, criticising celebration of Muslim and Hindu festivals and claiming that British people were being indoctrinated in the cultures of those religions).
He also proposed forcing larger London businesses to drug-test their employees – but with Parliament, dubbed the “corridors of powder” because of the huge “trace” amounts of cocaine that have been found there, exempt.
And he was accused of sexism as well as racism when it emerged that he had stated in 2006 that single girls in inner cities “deliberately become pregnant” in order to secure homes and benefits from the government.
Against such a man, Sadiq Khan gained more than 100,000 fewer votes than against Goldsmith.
I don’t think the drop-off was anything to do with Khan himself – or with his opponent, though.
I think it was about the leadership of Khan’s political party – Labour.
When he was elected in 2016, the people of London were riding high on the election of Islington North MP Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership with a set of genuinely socialist policies that had the potential to transform the UK into a vibrant example for the world.
By 2021, Corbyn’s right-wing opponents in the Labour Party bureaucracy had stabbed him in the back and had him replaced with suit-haircut-and-flag man Keir Starmer, who had promptly ditched all of those transformative policies in favour of an “any way the wind blows” approach.
In the absence of any policy support from his party leadership, it is a miracle Khan received as many votes as he did.
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Voting: but will people in Hartlepool vote Labour after the contempt with which Keir Starmer has (allegedly) treated them?
A poll – with, admittedly, a tiny number of respondents – has suggested that the Conservatives could take Hartlepool from Labour in Thursday’s by-election.
Is this because Keir Starmer steamrolled over the wishes of local part members to parachute a right-wing candidate in?
The behaviour of Labour’s head office with regard to the election has been, reportedly, a disgrace – and if this is how Starmer plans to run the party, then voters in Hartlepool will be right to abandon him.
The problem is that the Conservatives are likely to benefit from it.
Starmer is already facing criticism that his daft antics have strengthened the Tories. How will he be able to justify himself if they take Hartlepool?
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Police state: this image from the Sarah Everard vigil on Clapham Common on Saturday makes the message perfectly clear – your only freedom under a Tory government is freedom to do what you are told, and nothing else.
Everybody, whether comedian or economist, is standing up in support of UK citizens’ right to protest, after the Tory government voted to effectively ban it.
The arguments are clear, whether they come from economist Richard Murphy…
… or from satirical reporter Jonathan Pie:
The Jonathan Pie video has it right: If you can’t be heard, you can’t change things; if you can’t disrupt things, they stay the same.
Or worse – as the Tories intend – they change in ways that harm you and help them.
Well, if the new law means I can be arrested for offending someone, then I’m likely to be arrested.
So are you because believe me, somebody, somewhere, finds you offensive.
The only people who will be immune will be members of the right-wing press, authority figures like Cressida Dick, and of course members of the Tory government and their supporters like Keir Starmer.
See what I did there? Now somebody will be offended that I said Starmer supports Johnson’s government. I can’t help myself. But I’m not trying to offend; I’m only telling my truth.
Just because it differs from someone else’s, that’s no reason to have me arrested.
Not in a civilised society, anyway.
But if you’re in the United Kingdom, you don’t live in a civilised society. You live in a police state.
And you will feel the sharp edge of it if you don’t stand up to stop it now.
So get organised. Get together with other people in your local communities and stand up for your right to stand up for your rights.
Or would you rather just sit at home and wait for the rozzers to come knocking on your door?
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