Thread by @GeorgeMonbiot

The Conservative manifesto promised: "we will not compromise on our high environmental protection, animal welfare and food standards”.
Six months later ...
telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/…

The accompanying promise in the Conservative manifesto? "In our trade talks ... the NHS is not on the table. The price the NHS pays for drugs is not on the table. The services the NHS provides are not on the table."
How long will it be before we discover that this was also a lie?

If anyone believes the special tariffs will be maintained once the US has got its foot in the door, I've a bridge they might want to buy.
They're softening us up for direct competition with disgusting US food standards, without protection for UK farmers and producers.

This is how Johnson's government will rip down our food and environmental rules, while explaining that, to their great distress, their hands are tied, and there's nothing they can do to maintain UK standards.

It's not as if our standards are that great in the first place. But by comparison to chlorinated chicken, hormone-treated beef, ractopamine-treated pigs and antibiotics sloshed around like they're going out of fashion, they're a haven of sanity.

This is the real and long-standing agenda for Johnson and his cabinet of neoliberal ideologues. Rip down public services, public protections and everything that stands in the way of the most vicious forms of capitalism.

We are heading for a no deal Brexit on January 1st. To judge by the way the UK government is conducting negotiations - being as obstructive and unreasonable as possible - this is what it wants. Remember that Cummings said he wanted to stay for 6 months? This, I reckon, is why.

No deal lets the government rip down our public protections, trading as a deregulated freeport, with minimum rights for workers and minimum environmental, animal welfare and consumer protections. A paradise for the disaster capitalists backing Johnson. Hell for everyone else.

Just as Trump is seeking to erase Obama's legacy, Johnson and Cummings are seeking to erase Clement Attlee's much deeper legacy.
That's the game. A no-deal Brexit coupled with a UK-US trade agreement is the means.

I used to work in countries of the kind Johnson seeks to create: Suharto's Indonesia, Sarney and Collor's Brazil, Moi's Kenya. Economies based on brutal exploitation by both domestic and foreign oligarchs. I've seen what it means. We *must* stop it happening here.

Dominic Cummings and Steve Bannon are capitalism's equivalents of VI Lenin. They seek a global revolution, and see their own nations as the testing ground and vanguard of that revolution. They don't appear to care how many heads get broken in the process.

They want to sweep away all the old forms: public protections, public services and public institutions, trade unions and other brakes on raw, unmediated capital. They seek to create a political economy in which the most ruthless will thrive, while the devil takes the rest.

Trump and Johnson, to them, are nothing but useful idiots: blundering morons, desperate for attention and recognition, who can be played like a pair of violins. Cummings is cleverer than Bannon, which is why he's still there, pursuing aims Johnson only half understands.