Tuesday 21 March 2017

David Cameron "did a funny" so all is forgiven


David Cameron has been using his lucrative US public speaking tour to brazenly reinvent history but the mainstream media (including supposedly left-wing outlets like the Guardian) were too busy cooing over his Trump joke to bother holding him to account over his absurd revisionism.

Cameron made a lame jape about the best thing about having resigned in disgrace after losing his EU referendum gamble was that he no longer has to listen to wiretapped Donald Trump conversations and the mainstream press adored it. They lavished Cameron with praise for his wit, as if he'd thought of the joke himself rather than had it written for him by one of his script writers.

The press were so busy lauding Cameron for his edgy topical joke and helping him rehabilitate his ruined reputation that they totally failed in their duty to hold him to account over the revisionist drivel he was spouting.

Cameron claimed in his speech that the US and the UK have been "the guardians of freedom, of tolerance, of equality and, yes, of justice".

Freedom

As Prime Minister David Cameron was a big supporter of stripping law abiding citizens and civic organisations of their freedoms.

Cameron's government introduced the Gagging Law to stop charities, voluntary groups, community organisations and trade unions from criticising the Tory government.


One of the freedoms David Cameron and his savagely authoritarian Home Secretary Theresa May despised the most was the right to privacy. Cameron's government introduced Internet filters and legalised the unlawful snooping that the secret services had been doing for decades. Shortly after he quit the Internet Snoopers' Charter was passed, meaning that the concept of freedom from state snooping has been essentially abolished and the UK state gained unprecedented snooping powers that would have turned the East German Stasi green with envy.

Here's a genuine David Cameron quote to give you a clear idea of what his true feelings about freedom were.


"For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens 'as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone." [source]

What he was clearly expressing there was a desire to scrap the freedom of ordinary law-abiding citizens to go about their lives without being snooped on and persecuted by the state.

Tolerance

David Cameron's track record on tolerance is a mixed bag. To his credit he fought down the right-wing of his own party and collaborated with Labour, the Lib-Dems and various other opposition parties to deliver gay equality. But on the other hand Cameron and his government were never averse to using extreme divisive rhetoric in order to appeal to the extreme-right demographic. 

Take Theresa May's trolling of high migration neighbourhoods with her appalling "Go Home" vans. Take Theresa May's regular use of divisive anti-migrant rhetoric to appeal to the Ukipper demographic. Take Theresa May's spouse visa rules that openly discriminate against women, and against people who live in the less affluent regions of the UK. Take Iain Duncan Smith's sickening dehumanisation campaign against sick and disabled people. Take George Osborne's austerity agenda that loaded the burden of cuts mainly onto the shoulders of women.

Cameron always talked a good game on tolerance, but the divisive language and discriminatory practices of his government clearly proved that Cameron's Tory party had a very different agenda to the inclusive tolerant agenda Cameron so often liked to talk about.

Equality

The United Kingdom is an astoundingly unequal country. Parts of the UK are the richest places in the world, but of the 10 poorest regions in northern Europe, 9 are in the UK

David Cameron's government made this situation very much worse by handing one tax break after another to the super-rich minority, whilst loading the burden of George Osborne's ideological austerity agenda onto everyone else. The result of which is that the super-rich minority ended up literally doubling their wealth, while ordinary working people suffered the worst collapse in the value of their wages since records began.

Cameron's government were so successful in rigging the economy in favour of the super-rich minority that the UK was the only country in the developed world to see wages falling in value while the economy was actually growing

If the economy was growing, but the share of the wealth going to working people was in decline, where did all of the extra money go? To the tiny super-rich minority who bankrolled Cameron's Tory party of course.

Justice

If David Cameron's pretensions about being a champion of freedom and equality were laughable, then his claim to have been some kind of guardian of justice as Prime Minister was frankly absurd.

Who could forget that it was David Cameron's government that stripped legal aid to the bone in order to ensure that ever fewer ordinary people have access to adequate legal representation?


Who could forget that David Cameron's government was ruled to be unlawfully discriminating against people with mental health disabilities by forcing them through their discriminatory Work Capacity Assessment regime, and that Cameron's government ignored the ruling and carried on regardless?

Who could forget that David Cameron's government set about privatising vast swathes of the justice system creating loads of glaringly obvious financial conflicts of interest?

Who could forget that David Cameron's government trashed the concept of open justice by introducing Secret Courts where a person can have their fate decided in a courtroom they are not allowed to enter, under charges they are not allowed to know based on evidence they are not allowed to see?

Who could forget that when David Cameron's government were judged to have broken the law by unlawfully forcing thousands of unemployed people onto unpaid "workfare" placements, they stuck two fingers up at the justice system by rewriting the rules and retroactively applied them so that their unlawful rules would have been lawful had they been written that way at the time?

Who could forget that this retroactive rewriting of the law scam was subsequently ruled unlawful in the courts?

Conclusion

David Cameron gambled the entire future of the UK in order to gain a little bit of short-term party political advantage and he lost.

Instead of remaining in politics to try to fix the situation he himself created, he ran off at the first opportunity to embark on a lucrative public speaking tour of the United States in which he spouts absolute drivel about how he was some kind of guardian of the things his government relentlessly attacked.

Instead of holding him to account for this disgraceful behaviour the mainstream media overlook it all because he "did a funny" about Donald Trump.

The media are supposed to hold the powerful to account and expose their lies, not help them to polish up their tarnished reputations and laugh obsequiously at their jokes.


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