Robert Jenrick's diabolical GB News Tory propaganda piece

Tory MP Robert Jenrick complains about filthy streets full of litter on GB News for eight minutes, but somehow forgets to mention how Tory austerity is to blame.

The radical-right propaganda channel GB News has featured failed Tory leadership candidate Robert Jenrick in what amounts to little more than an undisclosed 8 minute party political broadcast for the Tory party.

Jenrick rocks up in Birmingham to complain about littering and fly tipping, which are legitimate problems, however the way he approaches the issue is diabolical.

The GB News caption presents him merely as "Robert Jenrick" with no mention that he’s a Tory MP; a member of Kemi Badenoch’s shadow cabinet; nor a former Tory government minister.

Jenrick only interviews white people, while Muslims and minorities are reduced to background extras in the clips of dirty streets.

Jenrick rails against the "minority of people" responsible for this filth, and the Islamic calls to prayer that seem like they’re edited into the background at various points make it clear which "minority" they’re wanting the viewer to blame.

The comments beneath the video on Twitter are full of braying racist imbeciles responding to all the dog whistles.

”Typical Muslim shithole", "send back all non British", "mass deportations", "import the third world, become the third world", "send all the foreigners back", “third world savages", "the trash needs to be removed. Then cleaning the mess they left will be easier" … it’s a cacophony of hate.

This is precisely the demographic that Jenrick and the Tories are pandering to.

People with minds so rotted by racism that they’ll overlook the fact that Jenrick himself was part of the Tory government that annihilated local council funding, and which only left power last year after inflicting 14 ruinous years of austerity cuts on our nation.

They’re so unquestioning and easily led that they’ll spew bigotry on command like a pack of Pavlov’s dogs.

Jenrick even has the cheek to interview a Tory local councillor, who rails against rising Council Tax rates in Birmingham, and the fact the Labour-run council has cut back £300 million in services.

Why did the council cut back this £300 million?

We’re not told.

We’re not told because it was the Tories in central government who massively defunded local government funding.

It was the Tories who decided to force councils to choose between paying for essential life-saving services and paying for basic maintenance issues like street cleaning, regular bin collections, and enforcement of littering bylaws.

Tory austerity forced councils all over the country to strip back local services to the bare bones; Tory austerity is the reason our streets are full of rubbish and potholes; and Tory austerity is the reason our Council Tax bills have gone up dramatically in return for fewer and poorer services.

Jenrick knows this perfectly well. He knows how much devastation his party inflicted on our local communities because he was the Tory government minister for Housing and Local Government between 2019 and 2021.

And he knows all about Rishi Sunak bragging that he cut local government funding for big cities like Birmingham, so that he could divert even more cash to the kinds of leafy suburbs and rural constituencies that tend to vote Tory.

But it’s neither the agenda of Jenrick nor GB News to inform their viewers of the facts.

Why on earth would a senior Tory politician appearing on a shockingly biased, billionaire-bankrolled, right-wing propaganda outlet want people to be informed about the devastating consequences of Tory austerity ruination?

But why is a Tory shadow cabinet minister like Jenrick acting as the presenter here? Even interviewing another Tory politician at one point.

Why the blurring of the lines to portray a partisan piece of party political propaganda as if it’s "news"?

Instead of letting Jenrick cosplay as a news presenter, why isn’t he the one being interviewed about his party’s role in all of this?

The answer is as obvious as all of the racist dog-whistles are.

We’re asked to consider the local volunteers who pick up litter for free, and credit to them for that. It’s good that people take pride in their communities, even when others dodge refuse disposal fees by dumping vans full of trash in their streets.

But then is fly-tipping really so unexpected given the example the Tories set in government?

The Tories spend their years in power defending the profiteering of the privatised water companies as they pumped billions of litres of raw sewage into our rivers and coastal waters.

What’s the real difference between a privatised water company boosting their profit margins by dumping sewage instead of treating it, and a dodgy builder increasing his margins by dumping vans full of waste in the street instead of hiring a skip or paying to leave it at the dump?

The difference is scale and political connections.

The water company directors use a slice of their ill-gotten gains to hire lobbyists to schmooze Westminster politicians and tell them that proper sewage treatment is a pipe dream, and that renationalisation of their filthy operations would be unworkable.

Meanwhile the dodgy corner-cutting builder dumps his vans full of rubbish in the streets at night, safe in the knowledge that cash strapped councils simply don’t have the means to come after him.

And now he can sleep even easier at night when he gets home from fly-tipping, as right-wing ghouls like Jenrick and the GB News hacks who colluded with him rile up the rabble to spew their hate at Muslims, foreigners, and immigrants for his filthy behaviour.

At one point Jenrick fulminates that "people are doing it because they know they can get away with it", but wasn’t that the modus operandi of the Tory party in government?

Make the public pay for the 2008 bankers’ insolvency crisis through austerity and wage repression, then blame the previous Labour government for it.

Brutally slash local government funding, then blame "failing Labour councils" for inflicting the service cuts the Tories forced them to make.

Use Covid as an excuse to loot literally £billions out of public finances, and just hope that their capitalist media pals don’t draw attention to it.

They carried on like this because they knew they could get away with it.

And here we have Jenrick, only interviewing white people who complain about the mess, and white people who clear it up. Meanwhile Muslims and brown people merely feature as background figures, walking around in the filth. And what’s that you can hear in the background? Islamic calls to prayer.

The intended subtext is obvious. It’s not the Tories to blame for trashing local government funding, and it’s not Dave the corner-cutting White Van Man who dumps his building waste in the street, for he’s just doing to his local neighbourhood what the Tories spent 14 years doing to the country after all.

In the Tory mindset Dave the fly-tipper probably deserves credit for his entrepreneurship, and his contempt for the tiresome red tape of anti-littering bylaws.

Jenrick and GB News are not going to explicitly tell you who they want you to blame, but the segment is so replete with dog-whistles that even their target demographic of the terminally hard-of-thinking can easily pick them up.

Littering and fly-tipping are legitimate problems that do blight our communities, but you’d have to be catastrophically gullible to take lectures on it from a dog-whistling, blame-shifting dick head like Jenrick on a rabidly right-wing propaganda outlet like GB News.

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