After a week of silence on the Northern Ireland riots, Boris Johnson finally deigned to actually comment on the situation, saying that he's "deeply concerned"
But if he's as "deeply concerned" as he says he is, why on earth did it take him a week to even say anything?
The BBC and corporate media outlets, who have been dutifully downplaying the riots, suddenly sprung into action, pumping out articles uncritically framing the riots through Boris Johnson's self-declared "deep concerns".
BBC, ITV, Sky News, Express, Times, Evening Standard, MSN, City AM, & others all ran news reports & articles uncritically headlining Boris Johnson's "concerns", without bothering to mention the fact that the border he's created down the Irish Sea as one of the main causal factors
When Johnson decided to lazily scrawl a border down the Irish Sea onto Theresa May's shambles of a Withdrawal Agreement, he wasn't just blatantly breaking his promise never to do such a thing, he was also wilfully lobbing the Irish Peace Process onto his raging Brexit bonfire.
Johnson lit the blue touch paper in Northern Ireland and then retreated back into his comfort zone, then when the violence kicked off, he sat there for a week saying nothing, before issuing a glib statement saying how "concerned" he is about the chaos he helped cause.
Then all the dutiful scribes in the media hack pack uncritically repeat his idle "concerns", without bothering to explain that he's the arsonist who caused the chaos in the first place
UK media is as horribly unfit for purpose as our bone-idle, bigoted, philandering liar of a PM
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As they were flogging off our vital national infrastructure and services on the cheap, the Tories insisted that government is too inefficient to run these things properly.
But now chunks of UK rail, water, and energy are being run by the governments of other countries!
🧵
Consider British Rail
🔴It now costs far more in subsidies to rail franchises than the entire cost of operating BR before privatisation.
🔴Profiteering train leasing companies killed UK train manufacturing by not ordering any new trains in the first 3 years after privatisation
🔴Fares have soared above inflation for decades
🔴Commuter services are overcrowded
🔴Rail in the north is an absolute joke
🔴The track operator has built up a massive £59 billion black hole of debt by leasing the tracks out to the franchise profiteers at way below cost
The BBC is launching a supposed "fact-checking service" called #BBCVerify which is set up to target alternative media, which they classified alongside issues like the UK conspiracy theory movement, the far right, foreign interference, and dodgy funding 🧵
It's interesting that the BBC considers itself so superior to independent media sources when it comes to stuff like misinformation and influence peddling given their own sordid history ...
For decades the BBC colluded with the secret services to blacklist left-leaning figures from BBC jobs to create a strong pro-capitalism, pro-establishment bias at the BBC, whilst publicly denying that that's what they were up to.
Tory propagandists have now settled on a narrative to explain away Kwarteng's disastrous mini-budget
"The Pound Has Recovered"
This misleading, over-simplistic, and downright inaccurate claim is now spreading like wildfire on social media with hashtags like #ScumMedia
THREAD
After floundering for several days, Tory MPs and right-wing hacks are now trying to explain away Kwarteng's disastrous mini-budget with claim that the Pound has rallied back to where it was before ...
Meaning that all of the criticism can be dismissed as mere "press hysteria"
This narrative is being pushed hard by Tory MPs like Brendan Clarke-Smith and John Redwood, plus radical-right propaganda hacks like Mike Graham, Darren Grimes and Emily Hewertson
It's also being amplified on social media by Tory accounts using Trumpian slogans like #ScumMedia
Hard-right Twitter profile with dog in photo and flags in bio: "If Remainers are so unhappy with Brexit then why don't they move to a EU country?"
Evidence of a remarkable inability/unwillingness to even remotely think things through before having an opinion
Hard-right ideas don't even have to make sense, or be compatible with each other, because the low-information voters/cognitively-stunted people they target can hold two mutually contradictory thoughts in their head at the same time, when most people would get cognitive dissonance
1. People who don't like [x] about Britain should leave
2. Brexit was excellent, and it's good that the Tories destroyed Brits' rights to live/study/work/retire across Europe
Completely contradictory. But they can be cobbled together into a brainfart if you're thick enough
Last week Kwasi Kwarteng crashed the economy with his disastrous mini-budget. Here are some of the main consequences:
[THREAD]
🔵 The Pound collapsed to its lowest ever level against the US Dollar, and has also fallen in relation to almost every currency on earth.
🔵 This collapse in the Pound has added to the inflation crisis by making imports much more expensive.
🔵 Under normal circumstances an increase in exports is the silver lining to currency depreciation, but Johnson's Brexit bodge stymies this effect through all of the additional bureaucratic Brexit burdens, which have caused an unprecedented dieback in British exports.