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

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 ...

Everyone warned Elon Musk what would happen if he started flogging verified status for $8.

THREAD Why would any corporation keep advertising on a website where anyone can do this kind of thing to their brand for just $8?

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"

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

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.

Liz Truss getting absolutely ruined on local radio this morning

A thread, with credits Truss reduced to stunned silence on mortgage fees, energy bills, government borrowing

@johnacres48 on @BBCRadioStoke

Absolutely sickening to see profoundly irresponsible, reality-averse, cherry-picking, pro-nuclear propaganda FAIRY STORIES like this go mega-viral.

[COUNTER THREAD] Propaganda tactic:

If you want to sell gullible people a total FAIRY STORY, label your nonsensical claims "REALITY" and they'll uncritically lap it up without engaging the critical thinking skills they've never been encouraged to use.

Rishi Sunak is the front-runner to become the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and he's just been using the "maxed out credit card" analogy to pretend that government finances are like a household budget

[THREAD] After the last 12 years of austerity economic stagnation it's wild that anyone is still using economic baby-talk like "maxed out credit card" or "no such thing as magic money trees" to justify more cuts instead of investment, but Sunak's just been serving as Chancellor!

David Cameron: Worst PM in living memory. A spiteful elitist Tory toff who strangled the UK economy with economically illiterate austerity ruination, tried to hand Damascus to ISIS, then gambled away the UK's future for a tiny bit of short-term political advantage

... Theresa May: Worst PM in living memory. A racist famous for deporting black Brits before she even became PM, who threw away her majority in an astonishing act of hubris, did a sordid deal with the DUP to cling onto power, and totally botched the Brexit negotiations

...

Boris Johnson's acolytes keep repeating the propaganda line that he "got the big calls right".

Let's have a look at some of Johnson’s "big calls" since 2019:

[THREAD] 🟦Lazily plagiarised Theresa May's crap Brexit deal, scrawled a border down the Irish Sea onto it, then rushed this absolute bodge-job through as fast as he could.

But it's actually such a bad deal that he's now trying to retroactively rewrite what he's already signed us up to!

By insisting on a "sore loser" referendum, rather than focusing on the immediate priority of preventing a ruinous radical-right diamond hard Tory Brexit, pro-EU campaigners ended up putting Labour in an impossible position in 2019, and midwifing their own worst nightmare Even more absurd is that after pushing Labour into throwing away 50+ "red wall" seats with this, loads of suburban Remainers belligerently voted for no-hoper Lib-Dem and Green candidates in Labour-Tory marginals anyway, handing Johnson a huge 80 seat majority, not a narrow win

On rumours that the Tory 1922 Committee could change the rules to allow another no-confidence vote within the next 12 months, Johnson's deputy Dominic Raab has claimed that "fiddling with the rules when you don't like the result is a bad look".

[THREAD] Raab is a minister in the Tory government that has:

🟦 Voted to tear up the Commons rule book after Tory MP Owen Paterson was caught breaking the rules to lobby government ministers on behalf of a private company he was being paid by.

mirror.co.uk/news/politics/…

Apparently, according to Facebook, telling the truth about Saudi Arabia constitutes "hate speech".

Here is a THREAD substantiating the assertions in the banned infographic: The Saudi tyranny just mass executed 81 people:

amnesty.org/en/latest/news…

Starmer says there's "huge enthusiasm for the direction Labour is heading in"

🔵 Abandoning renationalisation of energy/rail/water
🔵 Sucking up to corporations & millionaire donors
🔵 Purging socialists & left-wing Jews
🔵 Scrapping Green New Deal
🔵 Abstaining on rape-cops 🔵 Rigging Labour leadership nominations to exclude women and people of colour
🔵 Abandoning National Education Service
🔵 Burying the Forde Report on racism, bullying, and internal sabotage
🔵 Endorsing diamond-hard Tory Brexit
🔵 Abstaining on Tory pensions/social security cuts

If you ever needed an illustration that the law is applied very differently to the rich and powerful, just look at the ludicrous form the Metropolitan Police investigation into all of Boris Johnson's lockdown-busting parties is taking.

[THREAD] At first Johnson lied to parliament and the public, saying that there were "no parties", and the Metropolitan Police refused to investigate, saying there wasn't enough evidence, despite the continual police presence at Downing Street at the time of all the parties.

Remember when the wealthy commentariat class all laughed and sneered "who even cares about buses?" when Corbyn tried to deliver public transport policies aimed at helping ordinary people?

Well now up to a quarter of urban bus routes face the axe due to Tory under-funding. The "who even cares about buses" sneering was an indication of how wildly out of touch these comfortably rich, over-privileged commentariat class hacks are with ordinary people's lives.

Unfortunately it's ordinary people who now have to pay the price for their cluelessness.

I know I've written about this subject before, but it continues to amaze me how normalised we've become to the weaponisation of mental health terminology in political disagreements.

[THREAD] It's an absolutely ghoulish tactic to start expressing faux concerns about the mental health condition of your debating opponent, simply because you're upset by their political stance, and want to discredit it.

Labour's Shadow Justice Secretary Steve Reed has made an extraordinary announcement that he's in favour of escalating the failing War on Drugs with a policy of publicly "naming and shaming" drug users.

[THREAD] There's a growing trend across the world towards ditching the failed War on Drugs, with policies like decriminalisation, safe rooms, & legalisation appearing in dozens of different countries, including the US where the lunatic anti-drugs puritanism kicked off in the first place

Jeremy Corbyn violently punched in the head by a thug holding an egg

Media commentariat: Egg jokes and general hilarity Jeremy Corbyn targeted in an extreme-right assassination plot by a guy who went on to carry out a murderous Islamophobic act of right-wing terrorism at Finsbury Park

Media commentariat: looking the other way humming

While the deranged political commentariat have been frothing away about the mob who shouted at Keir Starmer yesterday, they're completely glossing over yesterday's parliamentary vote on Tory legislation to inflict savage real terms cuts on pensions and social security.

THREAD Johnson's mob went into the 2019 general election on a promise of keeping the Pensions Triple Lock, meaning yesterday's vote to impose real terms pensions cuts was an outright betrayal, and something any competent opposition would be vehemently condemning.