The Age of Bullshit

Humanity has had a Stone age and an Iron age; an age of Sail, and an age of Industry. Many have successfully argued that we are currently in the age of Information, and the eventual and tragic conclusion to the age of Information under capitalism is an age of weaponised misinformation - an age of Bullshit.

To be absolutely clear, 'bullshit' is not merely the act of lying. It is the wilful and malicious twisting of the truth and / or application of mistruth by someone to further their goals, or save their skin. Bullshit is not just the presence of a lie, it's a complete disregard for the facts, even when confronted with them.

Bullshit is Kelly Anne Conway talking about alternative facts when comparing the numbers at Trump's inauguration to Obama's. Bullshit is Boris Johnson travelling round in a bus promising 350 million a week to the NHS post-brexit, and then distancing himself from it the second the leave vote came through. Bullshit is Jo Swinson claiming her party could have gotten a majority, purely to ratfuck Corbyn out of a huge chunk of anti-tory votes at the last election.

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The problem of bullshit is ultimately a problem stemming from capitalism. Bullshit is rewarded at the highest tier of business by investment in insane tech ideas that work only in the minds of modern snake-oil salesmen, able to trick investors out of their inherited wealth to fund an e-cigarette that measures people's skulls. 

Billions of units of western currencies are funneled through this borderline wealth-laundering scheme, with an alarming number of these companies never even running at a profit, or eventually folding having spent the investor's money while failing to deliver a working product.

(If you want to see an example of this in action, listen to literally any episode of Trashfuture).

Because of the insane financial success and inflated stock valuations of these companies, bullshit is proven to be the most lucrative form of business. You don't need to actually be good at your job, you just need to convince the next level up that you're promotable by abusing the people under you. You don't need to have good ideas, they just need to sound successful while you take the credit, and then distance yourself when it all goes wrong. The business doesn't need to be sustainable, it just needs to make money now, and then when it doesn't, you dump it and move on to the next fad.

Thus the modern management culture of 25 year olds with no idea how to do a job, attempting to oversee people who have done the actual labour since before they were born, and fucking up entire industries to maximise the amount of short-term cash they can make.

Chief among the bullshit factories producing these people is of course Eton, the breeding ground for most of the current crop of Tory bullshitters. They specialise in raising an individual not to have any skills of their own, other than the ability to convince others that they are the right person to lead. They represent the absolute zenith of capitalist disregard for the value of labour.

Their only skill is bullshit, and they wield it liberally and constantly. And they are enabled in their delusional fantasies of what the public 'really thinks' by an entire industry of statisticians ready to twist statistics into whatever model is needed.

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During the May government, the tories fired the statistics company it hired to prove that brexit would be a success, when it reported that it would categorically not be. Proving only that the company who wanted to replace them would have to be willing to bend the truth to stay employed, and opening the door to a feedback loop of the government bullshitting, and then the lie being reinforced by statisticians willing to bullshit in exchange for government cash.

None of them are called to account by the press any more either, because the press now suffers a similar problem - journalism graduates who have no practical experience of any kind of investigative journalism, and instead are essentially well paid bloggers rewording whatever comes up on twitter, or quoting whatever the 'senior downing street source' has handed to Laura Kuenssberg.

(Also as a side note, political consequences have not really existed since David Cameron destroyed the concept of a scandal by sticking his dick in a beheaded pig).

The absolute state of Journalism and management training at universities is a reflection of the aspirational, middle-class focused attitudes of the student loan boom of the mid-nineties.

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I have to put a disclaimer here that this is not an anti-intellectual rant. Higher education and study are vital to the progress of the humanities and our broader understanding of the human condition. Tuition should be free, loans should be grants, and everyone should have the right to higher education.

But universities are currently caught in the widening gulf between the role of a vocational college, and that of a place of learning and inquiry. At university, the reward comes from writing about something rather than learning how to do something. Again, that is a fine ideal in terms of intellectual inquiry, the arts and humanities - the idea being that you study, you learn, and you go away and practice in your own time.

In the case of people who are studying something they are passionate about, this works incredibly well.

But the employment landscape is such that now, you need a degree to get a job. Young people are effectively forced to go through university in order to avoid the remaining jobs, which are underpaid and rife with abuse. So instead of 'wasting' time at a vocational college learning how to do an occupation, young people take out a loan to go to a university to write essays about the subject instead.

And anyone who has been at university knows of the people on their course who wrote their essays not to explore ideas, but to convince their lecturers that they had done enough work. Or even with  people who were passionate about their subject, tweaking the arguments of an essay not because the truth supports it, but to appease the lecturer you're writing for.

Bullshit, in other words.

More and more space on universities' campuses and syllabuses are being dedicated to these pseudo-occupational courses. Courses where students are suckered in with the promise of learning (for example) journalism, only to have modules covering the history of it, the controversies surrounding it, the implications of it and the social roles of it - anything but the practical instruction in how to do it.

Again, I want to reiterate that this is not a rant against universities. They are fantastic, intellectual institutions and everyone should have the right to attend one.

But they're not vocational training, nor should they be sold as such. And yet they are, by the new breed of administrator attracted to universities by ever increasing tuition fees. It's more bullshit, built to trick young people into abstract learning instead of practical training, and in the case of journalism, it's causing an immense skill drain at the national level.

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The first episode of the latest season of Hassan Minhaj's Patriot Act on Netflix covers the decline of local news in the US, but also reveals the specialist nature of local papers as the source of most investigative journalism, at least in the US. They have a long tradition of seasoned reporters passing on their skills to the next generation through paid, in-work training. 

Whereas monolithic national papers have little to no contact with their staff, and just pull in people who have the right degrees. Maybe at some point in the past they would have recruited smalltown reporters with a name, but the requirement of a degree has drastically weakened that track. Investigative skills never get passed on, and as long as the ad revenue is going up, there's never any reason for the editor of a national oulet to question the lack of substantial content. 

The job market demands degrees, and universities sell their degree courses as vocational training when in a lot of cases, the students leave after three years of abstract inquiry with no practical skills other than how to bullshit. Again, abstract inquiry is not the problem. Universities trying to cash in on tuition fees by bullshitting about it as if it's as valid as vocational training in preparing someone for a job is a huge problem.

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Not that a lot of modern jobs need to exist. Both Buckminster Fuller in the past, and the author David Graeber more recently have written on the nature of bullshit jobs (Graeber's words, not Buckminster Fuller's) - jobs which don't need to exist, serve no meaningful purpose toward the betterment of society, and exist seemingly because the alternative is high unemployment statistics. 

But we have an excess population that far outweighs the amount of labour that actually needs to be carried out. Most people's jobs are not going to change their company, let alone society. And even if someone realises that their job is bullshit, most people will nevertheless defend their job because under capitalism, the alternative is to starve.

This acclimatisation of the public to bullshit is magnified further by the lens of advertising - as a growing proportion of the population fails to 'contribute' by being in bullshit jobs, their only useful role to capital is as consumers.

Advertising also magnifies the unwillingness of journalists to call out bullshit. National papers rely primarily on funding from advertisers, who can threaten to pull it if they fail to fall in line editorially. Local businesses however need the papers as a platform to get the word out affectively to local customers, so have far less influence over them. 

Advertising is raw, unfiltered bullshit in it's ascended form. We know it's bullshit. We know it stretches the truth, often to breaking point. And we accept it as normal because it's constant.

Just as we now accept bullshit from our politicians and their advisors as normal. We accept that journalists won't tell us the whole story as normal, because nobody's training them to and their revenue streams incentivise them not to rock the boat. We know advertising is bullshit. And we accept not only that everything is bullshit; but that in order to survive, we ourselves need to join in the bullshit.

It's bullshit all the way down.

The Strange Case of 'Tactical Voting' in Wantage

Imagine a police officer chasing down a criminal (the criminal stabbed a bunch of homeless and disabled people by the way).

The officer is closing in on him, gradually getting nearer with each move, but then at the last second a security guard from the local shopping centre broadsides the officer, knocking him over because he wanted the credit.

Thanks to the officer's now twisted ankle and the security guard's general poor shape, neither of them have a chance of catching the criminal, who goes on to stab a bunch more poor and disabled people as well as set fire to a bunch of hospitals.

To be fair, he didn't sell it

And for some bizzarre fucking reason, all the papers have to say is how brave the security guard was for trying, how the officer failed, and how there should probably be an inquiry into his style of policing.

The officer in this metaphor is the Labour party, and the security guard is the Liberal Democrats. The papers are fucking idiots and Boris Johnson is the criminal, which is a statement that's true even outside of this opening metaphor.

Hello Disaster Britain

I'm going to put a caveat here in bold before I start; this is long, rambling and mostly for my own sake - I'm writing it to keep track of what I remember, and what I thought around the time it all happened.Putting it in a linear article helps because otherwise my brain has a habit of fucking off into tangents otherwise.

There are many disastrous outcomes of a Tory majority. I wrote about this shit back in 2017 and disappointingly, a lot of those issues are about the same as the problems we're dealing with in 2019 as well.

The chief one though is that Brexit is now all but certain. The tory rebels are gone. The Labour right are lining up to pull the party away from Corbyn's progressivism. The EU are sick of giving us extensions and Boris is already talking about trying to remove the authority of the courts and House of Lords. Bercow's gone. Barring a miracle, it's happening.

without comment

I'm sure you've seen plenty of headlines telling you which one weird trick put the Tories in power, or Laura Kuenssberg of the BBC crowing about the surging Tory majority (which if you look at the figures is less of a majority and more a searing indictment of how utterly bent our voting system is, but more on that later).

There were undoubtedly many things that went wrong. But I can show you two of the things I noticed at both a local and national level, and the figures that show how this wasn't so much as a Tory win as a remain split.

And it's all down to tactical voting.

The Plan

Tactical voting has been this election's big buzzphrase. In practice it means people voting for parties that they don't necessarily like or support, in the name of 'getting the Tories out' or 'getting Brexit done,' by the left and right-wing press respectively.

Well, it's had exactly the opposite effect for remain, and now we have a serious Tory infestation to deal with.

The Conservative and Brexit parties did have a tactical alliance - the Brexit party agreed to withdraw candidates from seats where there was a risk of the 'brexiteer vote' being split between BXP and Tory.

Honesty.

Initially both parties said there was no such arrangement, and then BXP quietly withdrew candidates from a number of seats later in the campaign anyway.

Wantage in Oxfordshire is one such constituency where the BXP candidate stood down, and no UKip candidate was selected. The leave vote went in it's entirety to the Conservatives.

I can't speak much for other constituencies, and I don't have the time or CIA/Russian funding to do a constituency-by-constituency breakdown, but I can use this one constituency as an example of how tactical voting appears to have absolutely fucked the remain vote across the country. 

The Problem

The brexiteer parties may have had a pact, but the parties in opposition to Brexit - the Lib Dems / Greens / SNP / Plaid Cymru - had no pact.

Combined, they had no chance of reaching a vote share that could have ousted the Tories. The Lib Dems claimed earlier in the campaign that they could achieve a majority, but dropped that stance shortly after the first debate.

They could have had enough voted for a coalition with Labour, because of Labour's nuanced stance on Brexit - a second referendum, but remaining neutral, knowing that the country was largely still split over the result and the only chance of healing the divide was to let the people decide.

There is a rampant batman bias in these captions

Remaining was still possible under a labour government. But Jo Swinson refused to work with Jeremy Corbyn. It's probable that she was influenced by the media shove over Corbyn's alleged unelectability / accusations of antisemitism, as well as the incredibly hostile media campaign against Labour, and ongoing bias from the state broadcaster which didn't even stop during purdah.

Labour were getting an absolute battering in the press - their stance was being misrepresented as unclear, where they were simply adapting to Conservative attempts to manipulate parliament into accidentally leaving without a deal. It wasn't going down well with the public and the Libs smelled blood in the water.

Ironically, a Lib / Lab alliance would have enabled remainers to first remove the Tories as an influence in parliament, and then campaign for remain in Labour's second referendum, winning them huge gratitude from moderates. And a second referendum under Labour would be infinitely preferable (from a so-called tactical position) to a near-guaranteed no-deal Brexit under Boris Johnson.

Yeah, this douche.

There were a number of times that a pact could have been established, most notably as part of the caretaker government proposed by Corbyn after a possible vote-of-no-confidence in Boris Johnson. However there needed to be a pact before the vote could go ahead, or one of the many extension deadlines could have meant Johnson calling a General Election and crashing out of the EU while parliament was closed.

It was all very complicated and relies on parliamentary fuckery nobody has the time to get into, but it was only one of many events that lead to Labour's stance having to adapt in order to stop a no-deal brexit.

Swinson however continued to insist that the Liberal Democrats (with 15 seats) had any right to tell the Labour party (with over 260 seats) who they should have as party leader, not just who should lead the pact. The other members of the pact seemed perfectly happy to ally over the greater threat of a no-deal brexit, but the Lib Dems were operating under the delusion that they could return to the 2010 days of playing kingmakers.

Sad trombone optional.

That's less the tail wagging the dog, and more like the dog trying to tell Godzilla which bowl's his.

Swinson should have stepped aside (and has thankfully now lost her seat), but these delusions of grandeur meant that the voting public were left to try and vote tactically, since no tactical alliance existed between the remain parties.

This was a terrible idea from a desperate remain base, since tactical voting cannot function without the support of the parties involved, and Swinson was continually stating that she would not ally with Corbyn. 

If you have a country divided almost 50/50 on Brexit, and the entire leave vote is united behind the Conservatives because of the electoral pact, it means the leave party gets 50%. Lets be generous and assume that the remain vote is split equally between Labour and the Lib Dems. That means that those parties get 25% of the total vote each.

hey guess who had to make this himself

Unless they have an electoral pact in advance agreeing to a coalition, that means both parties get decimated and the Tories gain the clear majority.

Remember that in British politics, a majority means you only have to control over half of the seats in parliament. You can't control parliament if you only have 25% of the vote, unless you have a coalition with another party that pushes you over 50%.

More importantly, an electoral pact means not spending your entire campaign slagging off a potential ally and reducing their support against a clear and united enemy.

It's a good policy, Karen (source)

Early in the campaign a number of Lib Dem candidates attempted to enter pacts with Labour on their own initiative, but were immediately replaced with fresh candidates or threatened with disciplinary action. This was absolutely a decision by the leadership, not the membership or the MPs.

Regardless of the lack of a pact between the parties, most voters ended up using tactical voting websites anyway, believing it would force the parties to enter into a coalition later on.

The problem with that approach is that firstly, the so called 'allied' parties have still spent the entire campaign bad mouthing each other and weakening each other's image; and secondly, there is no guarantee that Jo Swinson wouldn't have entered into a coalition with the Tories instead.

Tactical voting was probably a good idea if it had been implemented properly. Among the remain parties, it wasn't. 

The Tactics

The tactical voting sites seem to have pulled their information from combining the local council elections, the EU elections and previous general election results; then weighting them with the assumption that remain would be the key dividing issue.

Or rather; one or two of them did that, and the rest just copied the initial ones to make ad / data revenue.

The result was supposed to be websites where you entered your postcode, and it would tell you who was the best MP to vote for, based on who had the most support and the best chance of getting a larger share of the votes than the Conservatives.

The problem is that early in the campaign, the papers were misrepresenting Labour's position on Brexit as 'confusing,' and the Lib Dems were initially campaigning to revoke article 50 without a referendum.

Check out her voting record

As the intent was to tell people to vote tactically for remain, the options were most likely heavily weighted to favour the Lib Dems in any seat where it was theoretically possible for them to beat Labour. In the early campaign where the press were pushing Labour's position as 'unclear,' a pro-remain stance meant defeating Labour as well.

This was especially true in cases where the Labour candidate was alleged to have been pro-leave, or unwilling to take a hard-remain stance and lose their pro-leave seat. However this is only true if you assume that those leave voters would flip to the pro-remain Lib Dems, rather than the pro-leave Tories.

What's also interesting is that in the early campaign, this means that by opposing Labour, both the Lib Dems and Labour were fighting a battle on two fronts, against each other and against the Tories.

man corbyn looks shredded

Under normal circumstances, the Lib Dems 'creative' interpretation of the figures would just seem normal electioneering and futzing the statistics, until the discovery that at least one of the tactical voting sites was created by Lib Dem supporters to mislead the public, and was recommending the Lib Dems in clear Labour majority seats. 

This disinformation campaign ended up affecting legitimate attempts to advise remainers over tactical voting. It blurred the line between Labour's stance within pro-leave and pro-remain constituencies, making the national campaign appear inconsistent. 

Ultimately, it created a huge anti-Labour bias in the advice given to remainers. Labour were portrayed as either secretly pro-leave and not explicitly remain, or just 'unclear' because their position couldn't be reduced to a three-word-slogan.

Even when tactical voting sites later flipped to recommending Labour in the relevant constituencies, it was too late to alter the opinion of the copycat sites and low-engagement voters, who had already 'done their research.'

The Constituency

A good example of this is the mid-campaign article in the Guardian by Peter Kellner, disgraced former head of YouGov who failed to predict the 2015 Labour surge:

40 Wantage

Ed Vaizey, ex-minister and critic of Johnson, is standing down in a seat with a growing Lib Dem challenge

VOTE LIB DEM

The weighting of this study is based on leading questions that were roundly criticised when it was used by the Lib Dems in South East Somerset against Jacob Rees Mogg. Asking which party you'd vote for if one of the other parties wasn't an issue is just... Wow.

And yet it was shared and re-tweeted nonetheless, even quoted by the band Rage Against the Machine on Twitter, despite the previously established bias and remain-weighting.

The figures from the 2017 election do not support that position however:

Conservatives on 34,453 (+0.9% since 2015)
Labour on 17,079 (+10.8%)
Lib Dems on 9,234 (+1.5%)

Not only did Labour have almost double the votes in 2017, their support was rising 10 times faster than the other two parties. The Labour candidate Jonny Roberts was pro-remain, and pro second referendum.  

Previous GE performance is a far stronger predictor of success than EU elections or local elections. There was no reason to recommend the Lib Dems here, outside of a deeply flawed polling model and bias established in the previous section.

This election was unique, in that it was dominated by Brexit as an issue. But given that it was such unknown territory, the polling companies skewing in favour of the EU election and referendum results were at best engaging in guesswork in terms of how much it would affect things.

At the time the article was written, the Lib Dem party had changed their position from revoking article 50, to a second referendum - during which we were supposed to believe they'd negotiate a deal with the EU and then campaign for remain against their own deal (or possibly against Boris' deal, itself a redressed version of Theresa May's incredibly unpopular deal). 

All aboard the gravy tra- WAIT THAT'S NOT GRAVY

As the article pointed out, the Conservative candidate Ed Vaizey had also stepped down, so there would also likely be a chunk of floating voters who - now unable to vote with the familiar name - would have to find a new candidate. 

If there were any other reasons for voting against Labour apart from the 'growing Lib Dem challenge' which didn't exist, Kellner doesn't make it apparent. 

The best assumption that can be made is that with 50 constituencies to look over, and Wantage near the end of the list, Kellner and the tactical voting sites recommended for the Lib Dems without considering the mid-campaign changes to Labour and the Lib Dems' stances, and the strength of Labour's pre-exisiting opposition.  

Once this flip happened, it meant that suddenly it was Labour who were fighting a battle against two enemies (three if you count the press) - The Lib Dems who were targetting remain votes, and the Tories targetting leavers. 

The Election

Labour should have been the clear choice, and yet the Lib Dem candidate for Wantage Richard Benwell went into the campaign still printing leaflets with the EU election figures, using them to mislead remain voters into thinking not only that the Lib Dems were the main opposition, but that Labour were the weakest opposition. 

Other Lib Dem candidates were making much worse claims across the country.

In Benwell's case, this was possibly a case of believing his own propaganda, or maybe he just thought running a campaign in an area with such a strong Labour opposition would be a fun gap year project (I still can't tell if he's 14 or 40). 

wInNiNg hErE!

Either way it's hard to argue that his campaign was anything other than an attack on Labour, and an opportunistic attempt to take their vote share by misleading the public.

Again, this is to be expected in a normal election. But if remaining in the the EU was actually Benwell's goal rather than backstabbing Labour out of political opportunism, he should have concentrated his campaign on bad-mouthing the Conservatives to weaken their vote, rather than attacking his supposed Labour remain allies. 

Wantage voted 54% for remain, which means that this was a seat with a lot of remain and leave voters who could have been pulled toward an already strong Labour party with a neutral stance on Brexit.

Former Wantage MP Ed Vaizey was a pro EU rebel, so his floating remain supporters could have gone to either the Lib Dems or Labour. Pro-leave voters could only have moved to Labour or stayed with the Tories.

Don't forget your three word slogan!

It would be a stretch to say Labour could have won in Wantage by themselves, but what chance they did have was much larger than that of the Lib Dems. There's an extremely strong possibility that Labour could have closed the gap to create a new marginal for the next election, had the Lib Dems supported rather than attacked them.

This certainly would have been the case, had a remain alliance been in effect: the falling Conservative share could, with the absence of Ed Vaizey, have been comfortably challenged or even defeated by a combined Lib/Lab voting bloc - especially if the Labour candidate hadn't been fighting against Lib Dem smears as well. 

But even clearer was the conclusion that the Lib Dems were not winning here by a long shot. 

The Result

Turnout was 73.9% (up 0.2% from 2017) so it's unlikely that there were many more undecided voters who could have tipped things over. 

In addition, issues with distribution of the Labour Party's leaflets meant many voters never saw one, while Lib Dem Benwell's frequent leaflets ramped up during the last week to include opinion polls on voting intention by YouGov (which we'll come back to later). 

Rumours abounded among the Lib Dem voters that this was a seat where Labour were unofficially 'stepping aside' for the Lib Dems. Even if this had been true, it would have been pointless without an electoral pact at the national level - unless all of the seats go to a remain coalition, you're just splitting the vote.  

This, along with both the national Labour and Momentum campaigns focusing their efforts elsewhere meant that the results ended up looking like this:

Conservatives: 34,085 (-3.4% since 2017)
Lib Dems: 21,432 (+17.4%)
Labour: 10,181 (-11.7%)

A disastrous reversal of the previous position. Even with Labour defeated, the Lib Dems were unable to defeat the Conservatives because they split the remain vote.

The Conservative vote share certainly didn't increase - in fact it was down by 3.4% from the last election. Their vote share should have increased because of the leave voters lacking UKIP / BXP candidates and shifting to the tories, but instead it actually fell. 

This wasn't a surge in support for the Tories at all, nor should it be counted as one. Less people voted Conservative here in 2019 than they did in 2017. That doesn't point to people voting 'for' the Conservatives by a long shot. 

The Conservatives lost votes overall in Wantage. This is worth bearing in mind.

Mood

It would be easy to put this down to a disappointing showing from a Labour party hindered by leafleting issues, and lack of support from a canvassing engine more focused on marginals elsewhere.

But the effect of the tactical voting advice cannot be disregarded in a constituency which voted 54% for remain, yet had this large a flip within the remain-leaning parties.

The tactical voting advice told remainers in Wantage to vote Lib Dem; then in the last week of the campaign the Lib Dem leaflets linked to a YouGov opinion poll telling them that remainers in Wantage were intending to vote Lib Dem, because they'd been advised to by the tactical advice.

Before the intervention of the tactical voting sites, Labour had the most compelling chance of opposing the Tories and a guaranteed Brexit; but thanks to a flawed polling model and the percieved importance of tactical voting, the remain vote swung in favour of the Lib Dems. Just not far enough.

The resulting feedback loop seems like an alarming case of polling influencing rather than advising the electorate. Whether intentional or not, the effect is deeply concerning. 

The Fallout

Whether you attribute it to the influence of the tactical voting bad advice or a stronger campaign by the Lib Dems, the fact remains that an immense chunk of Labour support in Wantage was drained by the Lib Dems. The leafleting disaster seems to have had a large role in that, but the effect of the hostile press and Lib Dem attacks can't be underestimated either.

The Lib Dems, who were starting from a base of 9,234 voters as opposed to Labour's 17,079. The Tories didn't gain any votes, but perhaps with a Brexit message that wasn't being attacked by the Lib Dems as well as the press, further votes could have been pulled from leave voters as well.

Had a remain pact gone to Labour, they might have had the numbers to seriously contest the Conservatives, and give them one less safe seat in their majority. If the story was similar in other seats, perhaps we could have seen a result more reflective of the popular vote nationwide.

Figures from the Guardian

It was never going to be enough to challenge the Conservative replacement for Vaizey, who ended up holding the seat. Not through any real virtue of his own, as shown by the static vote share and high turnout.

Instead it happened through the aforementioned monstering of the Labour party by a strategically deployed set of misrepresentations and attacks from (and on behalf of) the Lib Dems, boosted by the centrist press. And all it did was allow the Tories to get in.

This was not a seat won by the Tories, it was a seat lost by Labour because of Lib Dem wreckers. Again, tactical voting only works if the parties in question are co-operating.

Going to post it again because I made it

Jo Swinson was unwilling to do so because of a delusional belief that her 15 MP strong party could get a 320 seat majority, and set about attacking Labour, forcing them to fight a campaign on two fronts - three if you include the hostile press.

Because of this, she may have handed the election to the Tories. The only surprise is that it wasn't as part of the expected post-election coalition. 

The Country

I wonder how many other constituencies have similar stories? Well-meaning remain voters misled into splitting the anti-Conservative vote through opportunistic misinformation campaigns. Labour and Lib Dem voting blocs which could, if combined, have toppled or at least given pause to the Conservative candidate. Nonsensical Lib Dem recommendations in seats where Labour were best placed to absorb both remain and leave votes.

65 seats in the exit poll were flagged as 'too close to call.' How many of those could have been red or yellow if we'd had the alliance? If the Libs and Labour hadn't been fighting each other, and instead worked together?

To be fair, there were many seats where the Lib Dems were the strongest opposition, and the Labour party should have stepped aside - if there had been a coalition pre-arranged. Otherwise the right and centre just waste time weakening each other while the right stands united.

It's better than the one I made :(

10.3 + 3.7 = 14. And who knows how many of the 15.5m non-voters might have decided to vote, had the only remain options not looked like a pair of bickering idiots, unable to co-operate? How many might have gone green rather than Tactical Democrat?

For all their efforts the Lib Dems finished with 13 seats and 11.6% of the popular vote. Nowhere near enough to contest the tories, but enough to take a chunk out of Labour's chances of opposing the Tories.

Regardless of the figures, the media is currently trying to portray this as the result of a strong Conservative Brexit platform, or on Farage's maneuverings and withdrawal of candidates in key constituencies.

But if that's true, why did so many people remain Labour supporters in the face of a hostile media? Why did the 'Lib Dem Surge' lose two seats instead of gain hundreds? Why did they only get 11% of the popular vote as opposed to Labour's 32%? Why did so many people register and then apparently decline to vote, rather than vote for the Conservatives or Lib Dems?

or christmas

At a national level it's clear that it's not because Boris was a more popular than Theresa May - Boris' share of the vote was only 1.1% higher than in 2017, with a 1.4% overall drop in turnout. Less than half of two-thirds of registered voters chose the Conservatives.

At a national level as well, there was no overall increase in Tory vote, even with the expected leave voters moving from BXP / UKIP.  This was less of a win for the Tories, and more a loss for the remain parties.

The Blame

Many are trying to blame Corbyn, despite the popularity of his policies with the Labour membership. It's very likely that the media assassination on Corbyn got through to voters, though this would have been reflected in a much larger difference in the popular vote between Labour and the Conservatives.

We can however see a split in the popular vote which - like with the Brexit referendum - shows a country divided almost half and half. Half to leave, united under the Tories, and half to remain, split between an incredibly strong and popular Labour party, and a parasitic leech of a Lib party, draining just enough of it's support to fuck up any chance of any one Remain party winning.

The Labour result is miraculously high considering they were fighting propaganda from multiple sides - both in terms of the campaign literature on the doorsteps, and in the media. Not just from the right-wing rags, but also from supposedly left-leaning and moderate outlets which signal boosted it in the name of being 'fair to both sides' and boosting the 'both as bad as each other' message when the right wing showed us no such grace.

I'm not saying it's him, but it's him.

The Labour party weren't perfect. Their spread of policies were popular individually, but when combined into the sweeping changes in the manifesto, it's easy to believe that they were 'too much' for the public. But that isn't backed up by Labour's share in the popular vote, or the lack of a significant pro-tory movement.

You could blame low-engagement voters, too quick to turn to easy answers and quick slogans on the right, or tactical voting websites which promise to do the hard work for you, but proved to be based on guesswork and poll wonkery.

It's hard to blame the pollsters entirely either. This was an election walking into unknown territory with an unprecedented number of variables - the NHS, Brexit, the climate crisis, and the youth-quake of new voter registration.

 

Turns out they were mostly lib dems, or non-voters

John McDonnell has also admitted that Brexit cost them the election. Much has been made of the loss of the 'red wall' of pro-leave Labour seats. The problem there is that again, the national vote should reflect a Conservative gain proportional to the Labour loss. It doesn't - it reflects a gain for the Lib Dems, Greens and SNP.

Unless the leave voters in the red wall flipped to the pro-remain Lib Dems, their pro Tory movement in these constituencies has to have been offset by a massive anti-tory sentiment everywhere else.
 
While on the surface it seems like Labour were fighting a battle on two fronts, they were decimated trying to fight a battle on multiple fronts - not just at a party level, but in the debates where the Greens and Lib Dems chose to turn on Corbyn rather than Johnson.

but why didn't you stop brexit jeremey

 

And that's not taking into consideration that they were also trying to take on public utilities, the machinery of capital, US healthcare firms, the banks and tax dodging corporations; all of whom would have been donating heavily to parties and publications opposing Labour's plans.

And despite this overwhelming insanity against them, they still only got 10% less than the nakedly evil Tories.

The Outcome

The remain side was let down by Jo Swinson, because she wanted her face on a bus and pushed to achieve that without a clear, pre-arranged electoral pact with Labour and the other anti-brexit parties.

Should Corbyn have been the one to step aside to allow an alliance? Again, I remind you - Labour had over 260 seats, the Liberal Democrats had 15.

They now have 13, thanks to the way their increased chunk of the popular vote was distributed across constituencies that never would have given them a majority, but might have just scraped a Labour win. 

Jo Swinson and the pro-Lib voting sites absolutely fucked this for the remainers.

via @AzzaBamboo on twitter

Ironically, if she had allied with Corbyn, she'd probably be remembered as the leader who stopped the Conservatives, then went on to campaign for remain in a second referendum, instead of the squirrel murdering melt history will remember. 

So what's to come of all this? 

Probably nothing. Maybe I'll be lucky and Owen Jones will see it and nod or shake his head, before returning to Owen Jones type things. Maybe a few people will read it during a work break, and then scroll on to find out who won Celebrity I Have No Mouth And Yet I Must Scream.

I couldn't find a relevant image so here is a cute pig

 
Maybe people will be more wary of tactical voting in future, which is good because that only strengthens Labour's cause and drives the Lib Dems further into irrelevancy. But they'll still be there, chipping away at the Tory opposition, especially in places like Wantage where they can now claim to be the strongest opposition. That's one less seat Labour can hope to flip in future.

None of this is particularly shocking if you've been paying attention to the naked opportunism of the last few years of Lib Dem history. It's certainly not illegal, and there's no manager for enraged centrists to demand to speak to.

Nobody's going to check the statistics before making a choice next time. If I wasn't an extremely online person, I wouldn't have known how. Nobody's going to read this whole thing and get it in one go, it took me months of being obsessed with the election to pick it all up gradually, and I'm still pretty sure I'm missing or not emphasising a bunch of things.

Every. Fucking. Time.

I think I'm just writing it so I can try and make sense of it all, and collect all of the links and arguments before I forget them. I'm also writing it because a complex web of learning difficulties, depression and Thatcherite education have left me unable to memorise most of the figures involved, or hold together this kind of argument in person.

As an adult currently unable to rely on the nightmare the UK welfare system has become, I stand to get absolutely rat-fucked by this decision, so no - I'm not going to be able to 'get over it.'

It matters. It's on my mind.


Ultimately, I think if there had been a pact between Labour and the Lib Dems, we wouldn't be staring down the barrel of another five years of Tory austerity and a disastrous Brexit deal which will lead to the carving-up of the NHS.

We might not have had a Labour majority, but we might not have a Tory majority, which might have been enough to enable the Lib Dems, Labour and the SNP to work out some kind of last minute pact.

Instead, this Tory win is on the head of Jo Swinson and the Lib Dems for their campaign of misinformation, their attacks on Labour, and their refusal to help the remain voters unite against the Tories.

This is Centrism

The Libs should have thrown themselves into the fucking sea, where hopefully they'll choke on all the microplastic from the 10p plastic bags their precious 5p tax led to.All they exist for now is to weaken Labour's opposition to the Tories.

Lying fucking splitters.

5 Reasons Britain is finished without a left-centre coalition

In his recent piece for the Guardian, Tony Blair finished with the words "This is not the time to fight a conventional partisan election." And even though I disagree with the tone of the piece (and his politics in general, the warmongering media-prostitute), I do agree with the sentiment - this is going to be an election unlike any other, simply because of the sheer amount of critical issues riding on it.

Because of this, I've dispensed with the usual flowery prose and I'm going to try and keep it straightforward - partly because it's important, and partly because we've got starlings nesting in the loft again and every few minutes are punctuated by mindless, ear shattering screeching for attention.

Picture unrelated. (source)

I believe that one of the many ways both the Remain and the pro-AV campaigns shot themselves in the foot was by playing too 'nice.' The leaflets for the anti-AV campaign were brightly coloured, two sided flyers laying out horror stories and shock tactics; whereas the pro-AV literature was just a politely worded letter which went largely unopened. Similar problems with the pro/anti EU literature as well.

So for this piece, I'm laying it out as a listicle. I've given it an attention grabbing headline. I've done away with my usual disdain for these 'cheap tactics' because this election is too important for the left's usual Cinderella complex; hoping their inherent goodness will win the day, and then taking the high ground when it doesn't.

The stakes are too high this time, and here's why:

HUMAN RIGHTS

We can all agree the Tory record on human rights has been horrendous over the last eight years. From disability cuts, their attempts to revive Victorian slave labour and tax policies disproportionately punishing the poor, they have already proven that they see human rights as something for the rich, not for middle and working class people.

Tory policy has lead to a divided populace, where half the country is unable to spend and keep the economy moving, and the other half is hording everything in offshore tax havens. Money isn't moving through the economy, and our national debt has roughly tripled.

However, Conservative policy has always leaned hard on tax breaks for the rich and a fiscal policy of punishing those they think aren't 'working hard enough.' So why is this election any different?

Because the Tories are about to write themselves a blank cheque. 

In the case of the disability cuts and their attempts at bringing in workfare, they were overruled because of the protections given to us by the European Court of Human Rights. And if Ms. May gets in as prime minister, she will have the popular support she needs to argue for the kind of 'hard brexit' where we no longer have that oversight.

And this isn't a leftist concern, this is something that's actually going to happen. The Great Repeal Bill is coming after Brexit, which will give the Tories the opportunity to pull all current EU legislation into British law, and then (more importantly) pick and choose the parts they want to keep and dump without a vote in parliament.

The Tories have long maintained in their last few manifestos that they want to write their own British Bill of Rights, using their usual dirty trick of sticking the word 'British' in front of things to gain automatic support from the 'patiotic' right. You don't need to imagine what that would mean for British workers.

This, but Poundland uniforms. (source)

We've already seen what they've tried and failed to push through, even with European oversight and the right of parliament to vote against it. With free reign over our definitions of human rights, they can finally get rid of as many workers rights as they like - maternity leave, optional overtime and holiday allowance are all on the chopping black.

This is especially worrying in light of their previous election manifesto, which says they want closer ties with countries like China and India, where human rights abuses over their working class have led to spiraling levels of suicide, workplace accidents and even deaths.

More concerning is May's recent cosying-up to Saudi Arabia, one of the few countries which still allows a form of modernised slavery, namely Indentured Servitude. Which sounds a lot like where we're headed with Workfare, come to think of it.  

If the Tories get in this June, we will lose our last line of defence against rampant abuse of British workers. 

THE NHS

If nothing else shows the way the Tories see this country, it's the NHS. People love and rely on a health service that's free at the point of care, and yet that's the very thing that the Tories hate about it. They resent paying for the poor and getting nothing in return - they've shown as much with the way they treat the sick and disabled. To them, the country is simply a cashflow; taxes in, services out.

Over the last few years, the Tories have stripped the NHS of funding and resources, dragging it to the brink of crisis so that they can justify handing it over to private firms. Firms, coincidentally, in which MPs from Jeremy Hunt to David Cameron have financial interests. It's not to sell off 'underperforming' services, it's to carve up chunks of British infrastructure and sell it to their mates.

And just as before, this isn't just a prediction about what will happen. The NHS is now taking it's first steps into privatisation, with services now being handed over to Virgin Care in the Bath and North-East Somerset areas. If the Tories get in again, they'll continue to pass key services over to private interests, and they won't be nice, friendly faces like Richard Branson in future.

Pictured left (source)

I've worked for the NHS, and one of the biggest problems it's always had is that the management is run by people with backgrounds in corporate business, who are unable to see anything outside of cashflow. At the end of the day, if that means cutting services or less profit, choices will be made based on cost rather than care, and patients lose out. They also come up with idiotic ideas like making hospitals and departments 'compete' with each other.

It's still early days, and the contracts are not set in stone. Only a few services have been handed over, and an opposition party could easily start the process of reversing out of privatisation.

But if the Tories get in this June, we'll likely lose the NHS as we know it.

POST-TRUTH ELECTIONS

And here's where we move on to another reason this election sits at the pinnacle of change, because of a worrying trend rising worldwide, a trend which it may be our last chance to stop.

The left has a problem with publicity, where it seems to believe that the right thing to do is present the facts to the public unbiased, and let them make their own minds up. And we as a country lose out to the liars every damn time because of it.

Theresa May has thrown herself into the idea of a hard Brexit, despite being opposed to it before the vote. The Conservatives are using every opportunity to call themselves 'the party of the working people,' when all signs show they're about to throw workers rights out of the window, and their opposition's name is literally a synonym for work.

Or starve them. Or let them die. (source)

But still they keep saying it. Last election they carted round a bus saying they were going to give £350m a week to the NHS, and then as soon as the election happened, everyone was standing round desperately trying to distance themselves from the literally huge lie that they'd all been proudly campaigning with.

The Conservatives and Lib Dems keep saying that Labour has no plan on brexit, when a simple search of Labour's website, twitter and Facebook pages would show that they've had a constantly updating and evolving plan since the vote was announced. And the modern trend of 'twitter journos' repeating whatever appears on their newsfeeds without fact checking have led to the wide dissemination of these lies.

This is different to politicians simply exaggerating, or twisting facts. This is outright lying, and the Tory right is front and centre in the whole debacle. But the simple fact is that they don't have to care, because the two biggest papers in the UK - the Sun and the Mail - are run by right wing billionaires desperate to keep the tax dodges that they rely on the Tories for.

The UK is also ranked 40th in the world for press freedom, below South Africa and the Czech Republic. At the moment it's unclear whether it's this bias that means Labour and the Greens are simply not getting airtime, or if it's a problem with Labour's press office.

But if the Tories get in this June, you're just showing them that it works.

THE FRAGMENTED LEFT

Theresa May cares so little about having to fact check or correct her own message, she's not even willing to appear in the televised leadership debates. Instead she's been taking part in heavily stage-managed press appearances spouting the only two buzzwords she seems to know.

But I have to applaud her on this one, because she's taking advantage of the massive divisions in leftist politics.

At the debates, if she doesn't show up, it means the participants will most likely be Labour, the Lib Dems, Greens, and probably the SNP and UKIP (despite the latter not having any MPS, but hey, they make good TV). That means May will be able to sit back and gloat, slipping a statement into the press the following day highlighting the petty divisions between Labour, the Greens and the Lib Dems.

Who, as we all know, are always treated fairly by the press (source)

And the parties are divided. That's the real trick to this election. A leftist voter will have the choice between Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens, and depending on which progressive agenda is most important to them (human rights or the environment), they'll vote for one of the three parties. But a right-leaning voter only has the Conservatives. If we assume the country is divided 50/50 left and right, that means the conservatives will win 50% of the vote, and the other three parties get to share around 16% each.

So simple mathematics seems to show that if you need a majority to be in power, the left needs to discuss an alliance. And yet they haven't.

Caroline Lucas of the Greens is the only party leader discussing an alliance so far. Tim Farron has swung from refusing to rule out an alliance with the Tories, to ruling out an alliance with any other party. Corbyn has been quoted as ruling out an alliance with 'any rival parties' as well, while discussing the SNP; although it remains to be seen if he considers the Lib Dems and Greens 'rivals.' And the SNP are pretty much untouchable thanks to the Sun's scare tactics last election.

For the reasons stated above, this is absolutely unacceptable. 

Now is not the time for bickering over Trident, or other minor policy differences. Now is not the time for Tim Farron or Jeremy Corbyn to hold onto a desperate hope that they can somehow lead the country on their own. Worldwide, there has been a rise in right wing politics, leading to the decimation of workers rights, LGBT rights and women's rights. May has demonstrated nothing more than a blind willingness to excuse and pander to increasingly right-wing leaders worldwide, regardless of their political leanings.

I'm probably going to be murdered in my sleep for this, but at this point frankly I await the sweet embrace of death (source)

When the Liberal Democrats formed a coalition with the Tories, they maintained as a centrist party that they negotiated a few leftist policies they wanted, and managed to prevent the worst of the Tories right wing excess. But the simple fact is that by allying with the Tories, they enabled all of the horrific policies against the sick, disabled and unemployed that the Tories did enact. If they hadn't formed the coalition, it would have gone back to the vote, and the Tories might not have gotten in at all.

And we find ourselves in the same place now. Labour and the Greens on the left, and the Lib Dems in the centre-left are all fighting their own corners, bad-mouthing the other parties to steal voters from them. But while the left works on dividing it's own vote, the right works on consolidating theirs. 

So if the Tories get in this June, the world will lose another country to the right. The privatisation of the NHS will likely become irreversable. Lies will further be proven to be the way to win an election.  The Tories might decide to redraw the boundaries again, gerrymandering out any hope of Labour ever winning an election on their own, in which case the left is dead in the water. 

***

That's why this election is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. That's why the parties of the left and centre need to stop fighting among themselves and form a coalition, because what we will lose as a country if the Tories get in is far, far more important than any of the issues that currently divide them.

For my part, I have supported Labour in the past for their pursuit of worker's rights, and I have supported the Greens for their less extreme policies on the environment. I voted for the Lib Dems the year they allied with the Tories and was livid at them for doing so, because above all else in my personal political views, I do not want the Tories in power.

My ideal vote in an election would be a -1 to the Tories to reduce their vote, because whichever left-centrist party gets in, they won't be as bad as the conservatives. 

That is why, to paraphrase Tony Blair, "This is not the time for conventional party politics." To stop the worst excesses of the right, the left and centre must band together, because this might be our last chance to do so.

SO WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT?

Just to quickly remind you of the numbers. (source)

You can make sure you register to vote. As the image above shows, the amount of people who didn't register to vote is massive, outnumbering the total number of votes for any other party. If even half of the people who didn't vote last time voted in this election, it could change everything completely.

You can write to your MPs. If they're Conservative, bad luck; but for the other parties, your MP could be the swing vote. If the overall atmosphere in the house starts to shift, I can guarantee you most MPs are cowards who don't want to be on the wrong side of history. And if enough MPs start making enough noise about an alliance, it could very well happen.

If you're not sure who to vote for, fill out a quick online survey about who's policies you agree with. If you don't agree with anyone's policies, leave your form blank - that still sends a powerful statement to Westminster when going over the results, showing there is a HUGE demographic that nobody's catering for, so that a centrist party can chase those votes.

Or, if like me, you just want the Tories out, vote Labour. Find out how to vote tactically in your local elections to unseat your local Tory MP.

Most importantly, talk to people in real life about this. The echo chambers of Facebook and Twitter tend to mean our best efforts online are drowned out by people complaining about all the politics or absorbed within the echo-chambers created by Facebook's algorithms and our own, carefully curated lists of people who tend to post the things we like.

But the largest demographics in this election won't be getting their news online. 

They'll be getting it from the Sun, or the Mail, or your racist uncle who's never fact-checked a single thing he's ever said. My nan's not racist, but I had a conversation with her about Labour's attitudes to the minimum wage. My parents have gone from not really understanding the issues to excitedly discussing them with friends they've never talked to about politics before. Things are changing.

The trick is not to attack. If you meet someone with right wing opinions, we're taught to humour them, or angrily cut them off without engaging. Well, let's give that thought it's marching orders. Correct people. Google some statistics to back up what you're saying. Show them snippets from this article, or any linked from it. Open up the conversation and don't be in the silent majority any more.

Because if there's one thing I want you to take away from this piece, it's that in 2017, we cannot let the Tory party continue to do damage to this country for their own gain.

So vote, you beautiful fuckers, vote!