Blackmail is such a dirty word

So farewell then, Matt Hancock. Caught red handed in precisely the same sort of sleaze and corruption in which Boris Johnson and the rest of his cabinet are almost certainly mired just as deeply. The Sun probably has as much dirt on Hancock's cabinet colleagues, but chooses not to release it:

Reportedly, there is a huge safe or vault in The Sun office, full of embarrassing (and in some cases probably incriminating) items on politicians and celebrities which remain (for the time being) unpublished. The Sun vault is also referred to as the "black museum" by Fleet Street hacks, and blackmail may be one of its purposes. Another purpose may be hushing up crimes committed by friends or supporters of Murdoch, including sex crimes later exposed under the police's Operation Yewtree. The retention of so much unpublished material is hard to justify: either these stories are in the public interest and should be published, or they are not and so should not be held in reserve.

Rational Wiki summary of a Byline Times piece.

Apparently there will be a (probably toothless) investigation into who leaked the incriminating material on Hancock. A more interesting investigation, which won't take place, would be into why Hancock was targeted in particular, and equally sleazy colleagues spared.

Three possibilities spring to mind:

1. Straighforward scapegoating - the government has so far managed to dodge a lot of the blame for the excess deaths and rampant corruption which has characterised their pandemic response but maybe somebody's decided they can't escape all the blame for ever, and Matt Hancock has been set up as the sacrificial example to absolve his boss and colleagues of their share of the blame.
2. Something more personal - maybe Hancock is felt not to have opened up the economy quickly enough for the Murdoch media and he's being made an example of pour encourager les autres to be even more reckless with public health.*
3. Something even more personal - something to do with a power struggle within government, involving one of Murdoch's most loyal fifth columnists in goverment, Michael Gove and his creature, Cummings.

Was Hancock thrown to the wolves at random because they just had to lighten the troika somehow, or was he the victim of a targeted character assassination because somebody important wants a change of policy or personnel? The great British public, in whose interest The Sun allegedly publishes such stories, will probably never be allowed to know the truth.

 

 *If you want a flavour of the Murdoch empire's real feelings about lockdowns and the associated public health measures, here's one of their more unmuzzled outlets, the US Fox News, describing distancing measures in the pandemic as "politicized coronavirus hysteria":

 "The riots have ripped the mask off the mainstream media politicized coronavirus hysteria. When it was politically convenient, the media shamed and attacked people who wanted to reopen their stores or even gather at the beach,” Cornell Law School professor and media critic William A. Jacobson told Fox News. “Now that rioters and looters are gathering in large numbers, the media no longer cares about social distancing, because the media sympathizes with them.”

Brian Flood, Fox News, 1st of June 2020 - no link, because it's divisive garbage, obviously.

Public to the left of him, AstroTurf to the right, stuck in the middle with Britain Trump

 

Remember when the USA was being run by that strange orange whackadoodle who used to say crazy shit about injecting yourself with bleach? Remember how that Very Stable Genius saw the world exclusively in relation to himself, and paid this "compliment" to our very own Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson?

"They're saying Britain Trump. They call him Britain Trump. That's a good thing. They like me over there."

The bleach advice aged like milk, but while no literate Brit ever called Johnson "Britain Trump", except to mock the massive satsuma-faced toddler,* the comparison has resonated with people who are far smarter and more thoughtful than Trump himself. For Simon Wren-Lewis, the parallels between the two are tragic rather than comic:

One of the persistent features of Trump’s period as president was his obsession with Fox News. He preferred to get his information from Fox News than internal government briefings. In time Fox News started to understand this, and some of its journalists started directly addressing him in their shows. Why did Trump do this? Because all populists are narcissists who want to be admired their people. Most of the time, Fox News obliged...

...If we believe Cummings, Johnson too is obsessed by the media read by ‘his people’, and in particular his own paper The Telegraph. He looks to them to check he is being admired. So when this and other right wing papers started publishing anti-lockdown nonsense, it got to him. As the Prime Minister who had locked down the economy he was no longer admired by these newspapers. This overrode any ability to understand the reasons why lockdown was necessary (and quick and hard lockdowns particularly), so he became over the summer a lockdown skeptic. 

The parallels between Trump and Johnson are striking but they're not exactly breaking news. What is interesting is where the far right/libertarian pressure that drove Britain Trump to botch the lockdowns is coming from. Because the "anti-lockdown nonsense" Wren-Lewis talks about didn't come from out of nowhere.

As Wren-Lewis points out, a lot of it is being propagated by the right-wing press, presumably reflecting the agenda of its oligarch owners.

But what's behind the Covid denialists who posted photos of empty NHS wards and claimed that the pandemic's a hoax? or the celebrity bobblehead who whinged that he paid the salary of NHS staff, who should be thanking him, rather than the other way round?

Did this furious anti-mask, anti-vaxx, anti-NHS anti-statist intervention arise spontaneously from the grass roots? An earlier post by Simon Wren-Lewis presents evidence that this is probably not the case. Back in 2018, he blogged about where the UK public was at, and it didn't seem to be with the small state libertarian vision of freedom from the big state:

When the public are asked about who should own and run various activities, there is clear support for more rather than less public involvement....

...Note that only about 10% want privatisation of the NHS, which has continued rapidly under this government. A government that reduces ernment spending and taxes, and pushes privatisation of the NHS, seems like a government of the few and not the many.

The post-pandemic outpouring of appreciation for our very statist National Heath Service seems to validate what Simon says.Whatever you think about the claps for carers, or the media focus on Captain Tom's fundraising efforts, appreciation for the institutions we have and the people who work for them seems to be genuine. Applications for nursing courses for autumn 2021 were up nearly a third from the previous year. 

You might still argue that Brits (or at least the English majority in our fracturing Union) are socially conservative, but you'd have a way harder time arguing that they're libertarian small statists.

There's evidence that the "lockdown scepticism" that didn't come directly from the right wing press was largely the result of an AstroTurf campaign funded by people with deep pockets and the same far right-libertarian agenda as the right wing media owners. A by-no-means-exhaustive list of examples includes:

• UsforThem

UsforThem, a parents' lobbying group, appears to operate as part of a network that disseminates pseudoscience on the pandemic, for instance, around the role of schools in transmission, masks, safety measures, as well as other issues such as PCR tests and COVID-19 death certification...

...In June, UsforThem coordinated a pre-action legal letter to Education Secretary Gavin Williamson, obtained by Byline Times under Freedom of Information, threatening the Government with a judicial review if it did not re-open schools without safety measures.

The letter was prepared by the same global multi-billion-dollar law firm, DLA Piper, which has advised the Government on its COVID-19 response. (Nafeez Ahmed, Byline Times).

• The Oxford COVID-19 Evidence Service, a disinformation hub apparently cooked up by individuals linked to finance, the American right and a network of right wing lobby groups. The Oxford COVID-19 Evidence Service's dubious claims seem to have been thoroughly debunked, but not before undermining pblic trust in public health responses to the pandemic:

The damage to public discourse has been done. Large segments of the population seem to be convinced that the scientific community is fundamentally divided on how to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. But this is untrue. (Byline Times).

This has worrying echoes of big tobacco's concerted, and unfounded, attempts to cast doubt on the scientific consensus on the links between smoking and cancer. Doubt is their product.

• Health Advisory and Recovery Team (HART)

HART was co-founded by Graham Hutchinson, who has coordinated the group prior to and since its inception. He was listed as a member of the group until mid-February.

Hutchinson is an active proponent of COVID-19 pseudoscience and other conspiratorial disinformation. He has claimed that “vaccination is pointless” and implied that vaccines are part of a genocidal global conspiracy: “An urgent message for those wanting a Vaccine Passport. Do you realise your passport will need to be kept up-to-date which means they could at any point, for example, say you needed to have a vaccine a week to do anything? #Cashcow #Control #Genocide.” ...

...Elsewhere, [Hutchinson] tweeted that “99% of the corona bollocks was to get rid of Trump” and praised Donald Trump for being “against climate” and “chasing paediphile [sic] rings”. (again, Byline Times)

• Then there are wealthy individuals on the libertarian right, like Simon Dolan, the Monaco tax exile who took Matt Hancock and Education Secretary Gavin Williamson to court over the restrictions, arguing the Coronavirus regulations were "the most onerous restrictions to personal liberty" and furiously denounces both public health measures and any suggestion that he promotes dangerous conspiracy nonsense (which he self-evidently does). Or the property tycoon Richard Tice, who has raged against people staying away from offices for reasons which have nothing at all to do with the waning profitability of his huge commercial property portfolio, obviously.

• The Great Barrington Declaration advocating a ‘herd immunity’ approach to the COVID-19 pandemic, a product of the Charles Koch Foundation-funded American Institute for Economic Research (AIER).

• As Nafeez Ahmed's article points out, the Conservative Party’s own COVID Recovery Group (formerly the European Research Group) seems to be tied in with this shady lobbying network because of course it is.

• And then there's the Reclaim Party, fronted by that NHS-hating celebrity bobblehead. Apparently the asset manager and political donor  Jeremy Hosking, who came in at 351 in the 2019 Sunday Times Rich List, provided £5 million for the bobblehead to spend time allegedly campaigning for the position of London Mayor, while splashing his anti-"woke" anti-lockdown, anti-socialised healthcare talking points all over the front pages of compliant newspapers (it's amazing what £5 million will do for the profile of a flaky no-hope candidate). 

 

Attack of the celebrity bobbleheads.

I could go on, but you get the picture. You've got a public which is broadly OK with the idea of socialised healthcare, and have been broadly amenable to the various measures needed to get the country through the pandemic on one side.** On the others you have a few polemicists in the right wing-media, speaking out on behalf of a largely AstroTurf lockdown backlash being fabricated by a tiny clique within the economic elite, afraid of the inevitable big government element of any serious response.

And in the middle is the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, paralysed by indecision, like a donkey between two hay bales.

Boris Boris Johnson GIF from Boris GIFs

***

 

*© Stuart Maconie.

** There are real people who are very much not OK with lockdown measures, but the objections are, as far as I can see, to do with individual economic circumstances, not the sort of implacable ideological opposal to the principle of lockdowns we've seen from the activists who've been trying to undermine them. If your job is the one that goes, or you're not eligible for furlough, or you're one of the left-behind self-employed who fell through the cracks, of course you're going to be desperate and angry.      

*** .gif credit.    

White supremacist does self-parody

If you take aggressive right wingers at face value, they're all about autonomy, self-reliance and individual responsibility. Suggest measures to reduce inequality, or positive discrimination to level up the playing field for disadvantaged minorities and they're outraged.

"People should stand on their own two feet", they cry. Policies to mitigate inequality and discrimination are just handouts to scroungers, they encourage a "dependency culture." Recipients are "welfare queens" (in the USA) or lowly vassals of the corrupt "Nanny state"* (in the Mary Poppins-loving UK).

In short, you, and you alone, are responsible for how your life turns out. Quit making excuses about where you came from. It's where you're going that counts.

Which is superficially attractive. Nobody likes a moaner, everybody admires people who make it against the odds. But I'm beginning to think that some of the most vocal of the rugged individualists don't really believe in the uncompromising message of personal responsibility that they preach.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you a recent outburst from right-wing tough guy, Stefan Molyneux:

"White privilege” was 50,000 shivering winters while others in endless summers danced and sang and had easy eats year-round.

East Asians had it even worse. Siberia. Snow tigers.

You fantasize about “privilege.”

No.

It was suffering.

So pipe down.

 Our ancestors earned it."

 

O-kaay.

On one hand we're supposed to ignore a well-documented history of racism, systematic oppression, slavery and discrimination going back solidly for at least four centuries, which still obviously affects the life chances of people living today. The US Civil Rights movement and "No dogs, no blacks, no Irish" signs in rented rooms are lived history for baby boomers on both sides of the Atlantic. Black Lives Matter and the Windrush scandal are current. All this deep-rooted disadvantage, according to people like Molyneux, would just go away if poor non-white folk just pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. We live in a meritocracy where disadvantaged groups are personally responsible for the continuance of their own misfortune.

But also, according to Molyneux, pale-skinned folk deserve their breaks, not because of what they've done. Not because of what their parents did, or their parents, or even their great, great, great, great grandparents. No, If you're white, you're born with bragging rights because you're distantly related to somebody who lived somewhere cold in the stone age. Extra credit for that less than 5% of neanderthal DNA you might be carrying. Award yourself a medal, why don't you?

The mask really slipped there, didn't it, Stefan? It's not really about taking personal responsibility for what you, as an individual, do in the here and now at all. It's about spreading a message of inherited, ineradicable superiority carried down through bloodlines over tens of thousands of years. It's racism, pure and simple.

So pipe down about personal responsibility. That's not what you really believe in at all.








*I've said it before and I'll say it again - it really is weird how the most vocal opponents of the Nanny State are people who literally have nannies.

"Policy based evidence making"

Simon Wren-Lewis, on what comes out of the wrong sort of think tanks:

The Knowledge Transmission Mechanism (KTM) is how knowledge produced by academics and other researchers is translated into public policy. Evidence based policy is the result of this mechanism working...

...There are two types of think tank. The good kind can be a vital part of the KTM. There is often a genuine need for think tanks to help translate academic research into policy. Sometimes these think tanks will be very like universities (like the IFS for example). Other times they will be think tanks that have a broad left or right orientation. These think tanks are an important part of the KTM, because they can establish what the academic consensus is, translate academic ideas into practical policy, and match policy problems to evidence based solutions. The IPPR is an obvious example of this type of think tank. They are part of evidence based policy making.

The bad kind are rather different. These produce ‘research’ that conforms to a particular line or ideology, rather than conforming to evidence or existing academic knowledge. Sometimes these think tanks can even become policy entrepreneurs, selling policies to politicians. This is often called policy based evidence making. It would be nice to be able to distinguish between good and bad think tanks in an easy way. The good type seeks to foster the KTM, and ensure policy is evidence based, and the bad type seek to negate the KTM by producing evidence or policies that fit preconceived ideas or the policymaker’s ideology.

I would argue that transparency about funding sources provides a strong indicator of which type a think tank is."

As Business Insider's Ben Moshinsky wrote last year:

A group called Who Funds You? has rated think tanks based on how much information they provide on where they get their money, assigning an A, B, or C rating to those who publish details of their annual income and a lower rating for those who don't...

...And here's how they stack up:

Think tank warfare:
"There's definitely nothing dangerous being covered up here, nothing at all to see, move along..."

"Because they're morons"

Mark Blyth's take on the Brexit vote is harsh, bleak and and it isn't new. But it's as true now as it ever was.

Of course, the use of the phrase "morons" will provoke the usual tedious accusations about Remainer elitists sneering at the views of ordinary people. But if you listen, this is a more nuanced explanation of what happened and the "morons" in question include the UK's political and media elite who incubated the stupidity.

As for Mark himself, he didn't get where he is today because he belongs to some privileged elite. In his own words:

I was born in Dundee, Scotland, in 1967. I grew up in relative poverty, in a very real sense a “welfare kid”. Today I’m a professor at an Ivy League university in the USA. Probabilistically speaking, I am as an extreme example of intragenerational social mobility as you can find anywhere.

Now check out the first three minutes or so of this video (if I've done this right, it should start playing about 49' 40" in):

Dead sardine is a red herring

So the Electoral Commission has fined Leave.EU a record £70,000 for breaking spending limits in the EU referendum. Leave.EU co-founder Arron Banks isn't happy:

“We view the Electoral Commission announcement as a politically-motivated attack on Brexit and the 17.4 million people who defied the establishment to vote for an independent Britain.”

He added: “The EC went big game fishing and found a few ‘aged’ dead sardines on the beach. So much for the big conspiracy!
“What a shambles. We will see them in court.”

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, he added that the commission was made up of “former MPs, liberal MPs, the SNP, former Labour leaders of councils, all sorts of people that all believe in Remain”.

Two things:

1. This is what Arron Banks has previously said about facts and persuasion:

What they [Political strategists Goddard Gunster] said early on was ‘facts don’t work’ and that’s it.

“The remain campaign featured fact, fact, fact, fact. It just doesn’t work. You have got to connect with people emotionally."

Which explains Banksy's fishy response to the fine. But if you can see what he's trying to do, you can get past the emotive language he's using to dodge the issue. The question here is "Did Leave.EU break the spending limits or didn't they?" Comparing the EC's findings to a dead sardine doesn't answer that question. That's no dead sardine, it's a red herring. As is his angry allegation of an "attack" on the "the 17.5 milion people who voted for Brexit."

It was an attack - on people who break the rules which are there to protect those 17.5 million people (and the rest of us) from cheats. The question, again, Banksy, is "Did Leave.EU break the rules?" The Electoral Commission think they did. If you want anyone to think differently, put up or shut up.

2. Having spent zero per cent of his statement addressing the substance of what Leave.EU did (or didn't) do, Banks had time to insinuate that his opponents were a bunch of conspiracy theorists, before launching into a conspiracy theory of his own which invited us to believe that the Electoral Commission itself was a vast establishment conspiracy. This from a man who wasn't above getting his underlings to smear an investigative journalist by photoshopping a tinfoil hat onto her picture:

"If there's one thing I've learned reporting the Cambridge Analytica scandal - however weird things look, they can always get weirder." Yep. pic.twitter.com/2MnkZh0JsP

— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) 22 April 2018

I'll leave the last word to that same journalist:

Story now up. Note, the size of the fine is not the real lead. It’s that evidence of crimes has been found & referred to Met police. https://t.co/y7eGsxhFnv

— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) 11 May 2018

We don't need no stinkin' (Br)exit strategy!

From last week, but still pertinent, here's Tim Harford on how a chaotic, incoherent non-strategy can be a feature, not a bug - at least for a while:

The Brexiters seemed hamstrung by the fact that they ran two mutually suspicious campaigns — Leave.EU and Vote Leave. “It wasn’t one of my adverts,” said Nigel Farage about Vote Leave’s bus, while Boris Johnson said Mr Farage’s inflammatory poster about refugees was “not my campaign” and “not my politics”. This left the Leave campaign, as Sun Tzu advised, “without ascertainable shape”, so voters picked which ever message resonated, while the Remain campaign did not know where to look. Dominic Cummings, of Vote Leave, later said a united Leave campaign would have been easily defeated.

This got me thinking about the parallels with the almost equally protean strategy that got the 2003 Iraq War on:

• Shock and awe your (domestic) enemies with an overwhelming blizzard of ambiguous bullshit* (imply that Iraq was behind 9/11, that its WMDs can be ready in 45 minutes, that we're wasting £350 million a week which could be going to the NHS)
• Include a grain of truth in the noisy matrix of nonsense (yes, Saddam was a brutal dictator, but we were specifically told this was about self-defence against an alleged imminent threat, not regime change), (yes, there were plenty of things actually wrong with European Union institutions, like the disastrous handling of the Eurozone crisis, but these had nothing to do with the claims on the Brexit bus, or the migration/border scares, the two central arguments which fuelled the Leave campaigns)
• Use fake urgency to move fast and break things ("...we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud", "UK faces millions more migrants as Turkey and its 75 MILLION people on brink of joining EU").
• Don't have an exit strategy, because that's just a hostage to fortune that your (domestic) enemies might use against you
• Mission accomplished!

We know how the 2003 decision worked out. The 2016 decision still has a way to run, but it's already brought us to the absurd paradox of being at the mercy of people who've spent decades developing their monomaniacal obsession with exiting the European Union, but never agreed a coherent exit strategy.

The poetic justice would be highly satisfying, if only the rest of us didn't have to survive "the shear where uncaring reality meets uncompromising ideology."

"Propping up extremist groups with fascist tendencies"

During testimony on Capitol Hill on 10 April 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged — for the first time — that it is “entirely possible” there’s a connection between Facebook users who had their data taken by psychographics firm Cambridge Analytica and content generated by the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA)...

...In March 2018, Malcolm Nance, a retired naval counterintelligence officer, author and frequent television commentator on national security issues, tells us he has long believed Cambridge Analytica provided a “data bridge” between Russian intelligence and WikiLeaks, a document dumping site founded by embattled Australian national Julian Assange that played a key role in the 2016 election cycle by leaking hacked e-mails belonging to the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign, starting in summer of that year.

In November 2017, Cambridge Analytica executive Alexander Nix confirmed that he had reached out to Assange to see if he would share some of the hacked emails with the company. Assange claimed he had turned the request down...

...Nance said he believes Cambridge Analytica’s story won’t end with the 2016 election, and that it was only one chapter in a long game with the end goal of crumbling Western liberal democracies from the inside out by propping up extremist groups with fascist tendencies, and turning citizens against each other.

Of course, "entirely possible" doesn't equal "confirmed" and Malcolm Nance's beliefs may be mistaken. Although these possibilities aren't just clogging up the conspiracy theory drain of the Internet, but are being given space on the respected fact-checking site Snopes, so maybe we (and hopefully any actual conspirators) should start worrying.

It certainly makes Farage's assignation with Assange for alleged "journalistic purposes" look even more intriguing. Especially since Farage still hasn't, to my knowledge, published any journalism resulting from that fascinating encounter.

Ears of corn

"We must also recognise there are real economic reasons why people have played up the issue of the Irish border and the need to have the shibboleth of the Good Friday Agreement."

Labour politician Barry Gardiner being just plain wrong about the Good Friday Agreement. A shibboleth, you'll recall, is a social marker which distinguishes members of an ingroup from members an outgroup:

...the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay;
Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.

Judges 12

The only function of the shibboleth is to distinguish between groups. The word's intrinsic, specific meaning is unimportant ("The term originates from the Hebrew word shibbólet (שִׁבֹּלֶת‬), which literally means the part of a plant containing grains, such as an ear of corn or a stalk of grain or, in different contexts, "stream, torrent").

The intrinsic, specific meaning of The Good Friday Agreement, in contrast, matters. The Republic of Ireland amended its constitution to remove its territorial claims to the whole island of Ireland. The United Kingdom ended direct rule in Northern Ireland. New agreements were made between Ireland and the UK and between Ireland and Northern Ireland. Watchtowers and border posts came down. People mostly stopped killing one another.

A daft quibble about cereal pronunciation it wasn't.

But Gardiner's use of the word did get me thinking about actual shibboleths. Not only was Gardiner wrong about the Good Friday Agreement itself, which was not a shibboleth, but the Good Friday Agreement precisely destroyed the power of shibboleths that had previously divided Irish people on both sides of the border:

In the BBC documentary series Who Do You Think You Are?, for instance, Graham Norton describes fraught childhood visits to his grandmother’s Belfast home:

I remember once my father got lost [in the Sandy Road area] and we were walking around, and I’d be gabbling on and my father was like, “shut up! Shut up!” Because if anyone heard our voices, you know, we spoke with a southern accent, it would have been trouble.

Dialect blog.

The Good Friday Agreement was all about getting rid of barriers and shibboleths. The global Trumpists, the Brexiteers and the alt-right are all about putting up walls, taking back control of our borders, sorting folk into "them" and "us", taking something as unimportant as skin colour or birthplace and turning it into a shibboleth.

For a long time I didn't understand why these sort of people kept on using this weird stereotypical vocabulary that you never ever hear ordinary folk using in everyday life - "snowflake", "SJW", "cuck", and so on. It doesn't make sense if you assume that these individuals are using language to communicate with others outside their own group. It makes perfect sense if you assume that these words are shibboleths, being used to self-identify as part of the ingroup.

One of the zeitgeisty books of the noughties was a hatchet job on business bullshit titled Why Business People Speak Like Idiots. Clearly there's a gap it today's market for a book called Why The Alt-Right Speak Like Idiots (tl;dr answer: because shibboleths).

"Nudge, nudge, wink, wink..."

Let's run with that unstated assumption that "those ‘choice architects’ claiming that they know what is best for society and individual citizens are exempt from that theory [i.e. nudge theory]."

Nudgers are, by definition, more powerful than the people they nudge, and more powerful generally means richer. If the poor are nudged, for their own good, does that mean that everything is now OK, because their self-evidently superior betters can be trusted to act rationally and reasonably at all times? How's rule by enlightened plutocrats working out?

Then there's the outsized role that rich peoples' irrational prejudices play in the policy sphere: whether that's Wahabism and its systematic oppression of women, or American hydrocarbon barons' climate denial, Mike Pence's Dominionism, Gwyenth Paltrow's multi-million-dollar science-denial business, Putin's violent aggression against anyone who criticizes the Russian Orthodox church, or Prince Charles's absurd belief in homeopathy. When the richest of the rich can swing policy outcomes just by insisting that they're right and everyone else is wrong, evidence is unceremoniously dumped and we all have to survive the shear where uncaring reality meets uncompromising ideology.

It's worse than that, actually, because when the shear occurs, the rich don't just admit they were wrong and move on. They jail people who point out their mistakes, get their paid-for lawmakers to defund research into their pet theories, and deny, deny, deny, until the seas rise and measles kill our kids.

Cory Doctorow

Either that, or they're wittering on about the urgent need to create a massive network of enormous pneumatic tubes, so people can travel in individual pods, because if you catch a bus, like normal people, you just might end up sitting next to a serial killer. Or falling for quacks who promise them eternal youth if they inject their ageing bodies with young peoples' blood.

It's almost as if unchecked inequality, which lets the irresponsible whims of the few trump the interests of the many, is more of a problem than the alleged fecklessness of the poor.

"...say no more!"

Boris and Vlad's PR agency

Is this what Mrs Mayday meant by a "red, white and blue Brexit"?

Both Sanni and Wylie have also confirmed that the harvested information has been shared with Kremlin linked entities.

These could include the Internet Research Agency troll farm in St Petersburg, accused by Robert Mueller and the US Supreme Court of manipulating the Trump vote in the US.

With a budget of approximately $1.25 million, the Internet Research Agency is mostly funded by Oligarch Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin, linked to the three state run TV networks in Russia and known by the Russian media as “Putin’s Chef.”

Prighozin, who held clandestine meetings with Robert Mercer in the Virgin Islands during the Trump Presidential Campaign, also has a major interest in Wagner Group, the corporate mercenary army implicated in war crimes in Donbas, Crimea and Syria.

Former Russian spy Sergei Skripal was poisoned, together with his daughter Yulia and a British policeman, in Salisbury this month using a deadly nerve agent developed by the Russian military.

A source close to Skripal has said he was investigating the collusion between the Internet Research Agency, AIQ, Cambridge Analytica and its parent company, SCL.

Roger Cottrell.

Having already photoshopped an image of Corbyn onto a red Kremlin background and - purely fortuitously - softened the outline of his cap to make it look like a fur hat, I presume that the BBC, in the interests of balance, will now be giving Boris, the Vote Leave Commissar, a similar Russia-themed graphic makeover?

What d'you mean "Nyet"?

Hmmm ... It's almost as if the British establishment will let a chap get away with almost anything, so long as he attended Eton or Marlborough.

Who nudges the nudgers?

Nobody, because they're rational and unbiased, honest:

It struck me during Chris Wylie’s commentary about the use of “behavioural science” that his language reflected the central ideas of nudge theories, he was using words like “heuristics”, “cognitive bias” and so on. He outlined the basic premise of nudge, too – the idea that humans are fundamentally ‘irrational’. (Yet curiously, those ‘choice architects’ claiming that they know what is best for society and individual citizens are exempt from that theory).

And if you believe that you're welcome to trust them.

Misleading £1 bus claim lacks ambition

Don't even think about making a dodgy claim about a £1 bus ticket. People will be outraged and you'll be forced to retract:

MEGABUS ads offering fares from £1 have been banned after the company admitted as little as one seat per coach was available for the price...

...Two people complained, saying they could not find fares at that price.

Megabus said the number of fares available at £1 varied due to factors such as the number of intermediate stops and whether tickets were booked for partial or full routes.

The Advertising Standards Authority said: ‘We noted in particular that only one of the £1 fares on the London to Bath route was for the full length.’ It ruled that the ads must not appear again in their current form.

Plaster a dodgy claim about £350 million windfall on a bus and nobody can stop you driving the bugger around the country for months.

Herr Goebbels must be chortling in his grave:

"The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous."

Money troubles

One good reason for not entrusting the future of the country to the people who think leaving the European Union will solve everything, is that those people look rubbish at handling money. First, if we're to believe the latest allegations, Vote Leave had more wonga than it could legally use, so breached electoral law by laundering its spending via a tiny unofficial campaign run by a 23 year old fashion student.

In contrast, the people who started this whole sorry business, Ukip, are so short of money that they've been reduced to a crowdfunding campaign to keep the clown car on the road. They apparently need £100,000 "to save Ukip whilst it restructures its position." Last week they'd raised just £610 of that figure. This week they're up to ...

... £620. At this rate, by my reckoning, they'll have raised enough money to save the UK branch of the Vladimir Putin Appreciation Society in about 190 years.

Admittedly the party's youth wing, Young Independence, has taken a bit of time off from trying to organise rallies for failed neo-Nazis to cough up £2,000 towards the crisis appeal, but even with two grand from the Batten-Jugend, they're only up to two and a half percent of their target.

Mind control, using the smell of golf

In hindsight, it was obvious that an outfit like Cambridge Analytica would turn out to be run by a an over-privileged bunch of shady chancers, lurching from one dodgy comic caper to the next. But what about CA's parent company, Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL)?

Of course it's the same. Of course it was set up by a chap called Nigel. Of course his parents are landowners from Chipping Norton. Of course he went to Eton. Of course he once dated a minor royal. Of course he claimed to have studied psychology at University College London, although UCL say they've no record of him ever being a UCL student. And of course, before he got into data mining and covert political manipulation, he was into a whole load of other weird, dodgy-sounding stuff. Like smell-based marketing:

...Marketing Aromatics, the world's first designer fragrance agency, devoted to persuading companies that along with their corporate image they need a corporate smell. Smells can influence attitudes and therefore behaviour, Nigel Oakes, the agency's managing director, said. And we know that behaviour, whether in employees or customers, is the dominant deciding factor in corporate achievement. At the launch he demonstrated a range of smells, including autumn, coconut, new-mown meadow, ocean, red wine, and golf - a subtle mixture of pine and sweat.

Like parent, like child:

You read the stories about Cambridge Analytica and you think, Damn, these guys are total geniuses who can control our minds. You watch the undercover video of the Cambridge Analytica execs and you think, Damn, these guys are seriously some clown-ass schmucks. Like always, believe what you see.

Meanwhile, in the real world, undercover police have been informing on health and safety reps and union activists, so construction industry bosses can put them on an employment blacklist and protesters are being prosecuted as terrorists.

Welcome to the "United" Kingdom, a nation divided and ruled by scary clowns.

Fake news factory fooled fake intellectual with fake office

There's a rich vein of social comedy in the Cambridge Analytica affair. Here's how wily old Etonian cad, Alexander James Ashburner Nix, conned that gullible American pseudo-intellectual, Steve Bannon, by appealing to his philosopher king fantasies of dreaming spires and elite institutions:

So keen was the firm to impress Mr Bannon it opened a satellite office near the University of Cambridge after Mr Bannon expressed an interest in visiting the city.

"We created this fake office in Cambridge and brought a bunch of people to set up this office beside the university to make it look like 'This is our Cambridge site. Our Potemkin Cambridge office," Mr Wylie said.

"And later, when the Mercers bought in and they appointed Steve to set up the company, he decided he should call it Cambridge Analytica... as a tip of the hat to our deep links to the University of Cambridge. And so a false reality was infused into the name Cambridge Analytica."

It's not being fooled that hurts. It's being fooled by fools like this.

Afterthought - maybe Hobo Trump got fired because, for all Bannon's intellectual pretensions, his boss already knew more than he did about this kind of bullshit:

Donald Trump's The Art of the Deal describes a stunt in which he lured Holiday Inn executives into investing in an Atlantic City casino by directing his construction manager to rent dozens of pieces of heavy equipment, in advance of a visit by the executives, to move dirt around on the proposed casino site, creating the illusion that construction was underway.

Never believe anything until it is officially denied

"Toxic nothingburger: Cambridge Analytica exposé is dangerous political attack posing as journalism" screams RT  (formerly Russia Today). "Apart from that, how did you enjoy your toxic nothingburger, Mr Skripal?"

"‘No Impact’: Cambridge Analytica Uproar Much Ado About Common Election Practices" insists Sputnik.

"THE Facebook data scandal is being wildly exaggerated for political ends." claims Pravda The Sun. .

Ukip 2.0 - still vapourware, one year on

So the mighty populist party that once boasted one whole member of parliament has now lost control of the only local authority it controlled.

But those politicians who cowered in terror at the awesome force that was Ukip should still beware. Remember, in March 2017, Arron Banks announced the birth of a new, improved Ukip 2.0 from the smouldering ashes of the old Ukip:

Arron Banks, the Ukip donor who bankrolled the multimillion-pound Leave.EU Brexit campaign, has said he has quit Ukip and will now set up a new political force...

He also described his new movement on Tuesday as “Ukip 2.0, the Force Awakens”, although it is unlikely to use the Ukip name. He has previously suggested it could be called the “Patriotic Alliance”.

So how's it going? Well, at the time of writing, something called  The Patriotic Alliance exists as a single web page, which claims to belong to "a grassroots movement built on the success of the EU referendum", with the stated aims of "holding the political establishment to account and introducing fresh ideas to the national policy debate."

The page has is no information about what those "fresh ideas" are and provides no concrete information about the party, or even proof that it exists as more than a single web page, but if you're interested enough, you can leave your e-mail address and "pre-register" with The Patriotic Alliance.*

But Banksy's not the only one with big plans for a new, improved, Ukip. Last month, the ex-Ukip candidate best known for his "Gay donkey tried to rape my horse" claim, founded another brand new political party - complete with donkey logo, naturally.

AKA Ukip 3.0, or UCRAP (Unusually Camp Rapey Animal Party).

And now Ukip's latest ex-leader has released Ukip 4.0, a dynamic young party otherwise known as OneNation, a piece of branding which deftly combines reassuring echoes of Queen Victoria's favourite prime minister with the up-to-the-minute aesthetic of InterCaps. No wonder Henry's such a big hit with the youngs.

He’s big, red and has a nice friendly smile which makes him one of the most popular policy vacuums in the UK.

This is the mighty popular wave holding Parliament's feet to the fire over Brexit. No wonder they're too scared to change course.

___________________________

*Update -  Since writing this post, I've come across a statement from Banksy, published on the 25th of March 2017, "introducing" the The Patriotic Alliance. To be fair, there's a bit more information about the "fresh ideas" TPA are kicking around. Although "fresh" is stretching the truth a bit - from what I can see, TPA is about reheating the familiar leftovers from the Kipper wish-list: an Australian-style immigration points system, ensuring only the "right" migrants are allowed to live here, a cap of 50,000 migrants per year and making prisons more unpleasant.

Other than that, Banksy wants YOU, potential TPA supporter, to spEak You're bRanes in an "experiment ... in direct democracy", presumably designed to reanimate some kind of Frankenstein's policy monster from the collective id of the Daily Mail's comments section.

When will this exciting experiment start? The TPA's web site was "set for launch in May" according to Banksy's introduction, although he didn't specify May of which year.

In an article last April, David Lawrence of Hope Not Hate speculated that the hyped launch of The Patriotic Alliance got delayed, following Theresa May's announcement of a snap general election, because "Farage is lining UKIP up for failure in the hope that they bomb so badly that the need for an alternative – in the shape of Banks’ TPA – is obvious."

If this analysis is correct, maybe Ukip's poor showing in last years' election wasn't quite poor enough for the strategists behind TPA and maybe they're still waiting for Ukip's final implosion (which can't be far off now the party apparently lacks the funds to even stage elections for a new leader), before animating its zombie web site. Either that, or Banks is all mouth and no trousers. Time will tell.

Question: "How deep is your love?"

Answer (if you're Transport for London): "As deep as a fifteen floor building."

Geoff Marshall plumbs the depths:

"Insecurity is fantastic" revisited

The usual paranoia warning applies here ("Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"), but some things are so stupid that they look a lot like deliberate sabotage:

One disconcerting possibility is that figures such as Fox and Rees-Mogg might be willing to believe the dismal economic forecasts, but look on them as an attraction.

This isn’t as implausible as it may sound. Since the 1960s, conservatism has been defined partly by a greater willingness to inflict harm, especially in the English-speaking world. The logic is that the augmentation of the postwar welfare state by the moral pluralism of the 1960s produced an acute problem of ‘moral hazard’, whereby benign policies ended up being taken for granted and abused. Once people believe things can be had for free and take pleasure in abundance, there is a risk of idleness and hedonism.

Remember, Peter Hargreaves, the stockbroker who spent £3.2 million on funding Leave.EU, said this in an unguarded moment before the referendum:

...a vote to leave would create uncertainty in the UK.

 But he argued that was what the country needed, saying it "would be the biggest stimulus to get our butts in gear that we have ever had".

"It will be like Dunkirk again," he said. "We will get out there and we will be become incredibly successful because we will be insecure again. And insecurity is fantastic."

Are they just trying to "take back control" in an incredibly inefficient way? Or are they deliberately conspiring to make our lives insecure in a very efficient way?