How has Britain has become so normalised to Tory lawlessness and contempt for democracy?

To get a measure of how utterly normalised we've become to Tory lawlessness, just consider the fact that they became the first government in UK history to be held in contempt of parliament for deliberately refusing to comply with a parliamentary vote to release the legal advice they received on Brexit, and it's already been forgotten about within days.

This is always the case. Tory lawlessness and contempt for democracy always gets swept under the carpet and forgotten about.

• Remember when Theresa May and the Tories were defeated in the Supreme Court over their efforts to completely sideline parliament in order to make democratic opposition to Theresa May's hard-right Brexit scheming impossible? 

• Remember how the Tories' propaganda merchants in the right-wing rags triggered a tsunami of death threats and abuse against the judges who ruled that parliament is sovereign and Theresa May can't just make up Brexit as she goes along with no democratic scrutiny?

• Remember when the Tories introduced unlawful tribunal fees designed to protect bad bosses by pricing mistreated workers out of the justice system?

• Remember when the courts found that the draconian Tory Work Capacity Assessment regime for disabled people was unlawfully discriminating against those with mental health conditions, yet they carried on regardless?

• Remember when the Tories' ideologically driven benefit cap was declared unlawful by the courts for impoverishing single-parent families and causing misery "for no good reason"? 

• Remember when their policy of using the unemployed as a source of free labour for their corporate mates (Workfare) were repeatedly defeated in the courts?

• Remember when the Tories absolutely gutted Legal Aid in order to price poor and ordinary people out of the justice system and make it almost impossible for the victims of their malicious and unjust welfare policies to seek justice in the courts?

• Remember when unlawful Tory efforts to shut down Lewisham hospital were defeated in the courts? (so they simply rewrote the rules to make it much easier for them to shut down NHS facilities against the will of the local community).

• Remember when the Tories wasted £500,000 of public money in under a year challenging criticism of their track record on air pollution, resulting in a hat-trick of court defeats?

• And then there's all the blatantly fraudulent campaign spending the Tories did during the 2015 General Election (that they only got away with because the Electoral Commission are such a toothless and incompetent electoral regulator).

This is a government riddled with contempt for parliamentary democracy and contempt towards the rule of law, yet they're barely ever held to account for it by the mainstream media. And on the rare occasions that the public do actually hear about these extraordinary scandals, the tendency is to shrug it all off as if lawlessness, corruption and contempt for democracy are normal and unavoidable, rather than outrageous and unacceptable.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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10 reasons the "revealing our hand will weaken our negotiating position" argument is so idiotic

Theresa May's cowardly new tactic of insulting parliament by instructing her MPs to not even bother voting on parliamentary motions so as to childishly claim 'the vote didn't count because we didn't participate' has backfired spectacularly.

Last week the opposition parties unanimously won a vote that the Conservative government should release the 58 Brexit impact assessments they've been hiding.After nearly a week of stalling the Speaker of the House John Bercow has given the government a deadline of the evening of Tuesday 7th November (today) to release them to the Brexit Select Committee or explain the delay.

This news has been greeted with howls of consternation from barrel-scraping Brexiters, who insist on mindlessly regurgitating the idiotic pro-secrecy line they've been programmed to believe in by the billionaire-owned extreme-right propaganda rags: "revealing our hand will weaken our negotiating position".

In this article I'm quickly going to run through several reasons that anyone spewing this pro-secrecy propaganda trope is a gullible halfwit.

1. If secrecy about the economic impact of Brexit is so absolutely vital in order to strengthen our negotiating position, how come the EU27 have openly published their own Brexit economic impact assessment? If keeping what you know out of the public domain is so spectacularly important, why on earth have the EU done this?

2. If the Brexit impact assessments showed that a "no deal" Brexit would be good for the UK economy, do you honestly believe the Tories would be so absolutely desperate to keep it secret? Do you really think they wouldn't be shouting from the rooftops about it?

3. Do you really believe that the EU haven't done their own impact assessments that show more or less the same poor outcomes as the impact assessments the UK government are trying to keep secret from us? If you do believe that they haven't bothered to model the impact of various Brexit scenarios, please refer back to point one and click the link. 

4. If you accept the evidence that the EU have modelled the economic impacts of different versions of Brexit, then it's obvious that they know that Theresa May is bluffing with a duff hand of cards, so continuing to keep them secret serves no purpose other than denying ammunition to her domestic critics.

5. It should be beyond obvious that the Tories are trying to keep these impact assessments secret, not because they don't want the EU27 to see them, but because they don't want the UK general public or their political opponents to see them. The EU27 have already modelled Brexit and worked out which kinds of scenario are least damaging to them (and to us). If the British public are handed a massive wodge of evidence that a "no deal" Brexit would be the most economically disastrous option, it would force the Tories into explaining why they've made threatening to inflict such a crappy scenario the absolute centrepiece of their so-called "negotiating strategy".

6. Didn't you lot vote for Brexit in order to "take back control"? So which part of allowing the government to hide vital information about the nation's future from you in order to protect their own party political interests makes you feel you have taken back control? 

7. Even if you don't personally have any curiosity whatever about what the government is trying to hide from you, surely you must accept that other people who actually do care about the nation's future should have access to this information? Otherwise you're arguing that the Tory government should have the right to act in whatever way they like, with no external scrutiny whatever. You're essentially arguing in favour of autocracy.

8. In reality Brexit is the most complex and risky diplomatic situation that the UK has faced since at least the end of WWII, with the likelihood of extremely harmful outcomes for both sides if it all goes wrong. If the only way you're capable of comprehending this highly complex process is through reference to ridiculously simplistic analogies to a win or lose game of poker where the players mustn't reveal their cards to each other, sorry, you're an idiot. And every time you fall back on this shockingly over-simplistic and actually very misleading analogy, you're just making yourself look even more of an idiot.  

9. Didn't you lot also bang on and on about the importance of "parliamentary sovereignty" during the EU referendum debate? Well - according to the actual rules of parliament, the government now need to release the Brexit impact assessments or be held in contempt. If you're still trying to argue that the Brexit impact assessments shouldn't be released, you're essentially arguing that parliament shouldn't be sovereign, and that the government should be allowed to act with impunity as long as they reassure you that they're delivering what you want. In other words, your position is that as long as the government propaganda is satisfactory, you're in favour of dictatorship.

10. Perhaps the simplest criticism of all is that your pro-secrecy position is little more than an assertion of your absolute faith in the government. 'The government are best placed to deal with this issue, I trust them 100%, and nobody else should worry their pretty little heads about what they're up to' is a shockingly naive stance even in the best of circumstances, but with people like Theresa May, Boris Johnson, the disgraced Liam Fox, and bumbling David Davis running the show it's absolute lunacy. Nobody with any sense would let that hopeless bunch organise a church hall raffle, let alone the most complex diplomatic process the nation has faced in decades.

It's important to note that this ludicrous "revealing our hand will weaken our negotiating position" argument won't go away if/when the Brexit impact assessments are released. It will simply morph into a Brexiter excuse for why Brexit is turning out to be such a shambles.

They'll brazenly ignore the fact that the reports they wanted to keep hidden actually predicted the economic shambles they're whining on about, in order to make the accusation that "Brexit would have gone brilliantly had you traitors not forced us reveal our hand to the EU".

The whole poker-based pro-secrecy argument is hideous idiocy. But it's going to come back again and again in different forms because the mindless propaganda rote learners have been programmed to regurgitate this piteous nonsense in lieu of actually forming their own political opinions.

The vital thing is that this kind of idiocy is repeatedly called out and ridiculed for the gibbering nonsense that it is. So feel free to borrow any of these points the next time you see anyone making this kind of simple-minded, shockingly gullible, and brazenly anti-democratic poker-based argument in favour of government secrecy.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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The political extremism of Nigel Farage

In this article I'm going to look at the increasingly warped and dangerous political ideology being espoused by former UKIP leader and mainstream media darling Nigel Farage.

Intimidation of the judiciary

Nigel Farage detests democracy. In fact he even threatened to raise a gigantic mob to intimidate the judiciary into scrapping the principle of parliamentary sovereignty. He was so keen to establish the principle that the Prime Minister can simply make up the law of the land by themselves, with no parliamentary scrutiny whatever, that he tried to raise a right-wing mob to achieve it.

It's incredible that Ukippers who never shut up about the importance of parliamentary sovereignty before the EU referendum were suddenly shrieking for the principle of parliamentary sovereignty to be consigned to the dustbin of history just in case MPs might decide that Theresa May and her Brexiteer charlatans are making an absolute mess of Brexit and put the brakes on the thing in order to sort out some kind of coherent plan.

In the end Farage's threatened flash mob for dictatorship never materialised, presumably because Farage realised that fearmongering people into voting for Brexit was a hell of a lot easier than convincing them to actually join an extreme-right street protest demanding the principle of parliamentary democracy be scrapped. 

Farage didn't want the embarrassment of threatening to lead an army of 100,000+ to intimidate the judiciary, but ending up just leading an embarrassing anti-democracy parade of a few thousand of the most crazed Ukippers, Biffers and assorted other extreme-right anti-democrats, so he scrapped the whole idea.

Donald Trump's butler

Farage began sucking up to Donald Trump way before the orange one was elected as President. In fact it was on a July 2016 trip to the US to share his Brexit gloating with Trump and the Republican Party convention that Farage's aide was arrested by US authorities for having orchestrated a dark web drug money laundering scam.

When Donald Trump won the Presidential election Farage made a beeline for the US to appear with Trump in a gold encrusted elevator, just as all good unironic "man-of-the-people anti-establishment firebrands" surely should.

Upon returning to the UK Farage then set about demanding that Theresa May appoint him as UK ambassador to the US, which displays an incredible misunderstanding of what the role of an ambassador is.

The job of ambassador to the US is to promote the interests of the UK to the Americans. The way that Farage has been sucking up to Donald Trump makes it absolutely clear that he sees the job of UK ambassador to the US as an opportunity to promote Donald Trump's interests to the British.

Theresa May has done a woeful job of Prime Minister so far, but even she had sufficient sense to ignore Farage's ludicrous demands for her to make him Donald Trump's official state appointed British butler.

Nazi style propaganda

Nobody sensible would claim that all Brexit voters are raving xenophobic bigots, some of them had non-bigoted reasons for voting the way they did.

The reality though is that the EU referendum was won by just 700,000 odd people casting their vote one way rather than the other, and few would even attempt to deny that a great deal more than 700,000 Leave voters were of the bigoted Biffer variety with heads full of anti-immigrant hatred.

Not all Brexiters are racist, but all racists are Brexiters.

Farage knew perfectly well that he needed to bring out the swivel-eyed racists in force in order to win the EU referendum, hence the commissioning of a Nazi style anti-immigrant poster modelled on the anti-Jewish propaganda of the 1930s.

Farage's ploy succeeded and a strong turnout of bigots ensured a win for the Leave campaign, but anyone with any sense of decency on either side of the EU referendum debate was left shocked at Farage's deliberate employment of Nazi style propaganda.

Alignment with the extreme-right

Many people were shocked by Nigel Farage's attack on the bereaved husband of Jo Cox, because attacking the widow of a murder victim would be bad enough in it's own right, but when the murderer shared the same fanatical hatred of immigrants and the EU as Farage does, then it's clearly incredibly tasteless and pretty damned un-British too.

One of the most telling things about his attack on Brendan Cox was the way Farage described the anti-fascist Hope Not Hate campaign as "extremists".

Farage has never had a problem receiving endorsements and adulation from the fanatical extreme-right. He hasn't spoken out against the vile extreme-right hate group Britain First instructing their followers to vote UKIP because he sees regular Britain First endorsements as useful free propaganda.

Thus Nigel Farage is trying to spread the Orwellian propaganda narrative that Britain First and the hatemongering fascist fringe are the good guys who need defending from anti-fascist organisations like Hope Not Hate, who are the evil extremists!

By publicly attacking and defaming the anti-fascist movement Farage is clearly trying to align himself with outright fascists in order to win their political support, just as Donald Trump openly courted the white supremacist "Alt-Right" fascists in the US and rewarded them with a key position in his administration for Steve Bannon.

Making up self-serving rules

Before the EU referendum result came in, fearing defeat for the Brexit campaign, Farage argued for a second referendum in the case of a 52-48 win for Remain saying that such a situation "would be unfinished business by a long way". After Leave won by ... err ... 52-48 Farage has changed his tune dramatically, claiming that any attempts to stop Brexit by means of a second referendum would result in "political anger the likes of which none of us in our lifetimes have ever witnessed in this country", when pressed on the issue by Andrew Marr, Farage agreed that he was predicting riots in the streets.

So if Remain won a narrow victory Farage clearly wanted a second referendum, but after Leave won a narrow victory Farage threatened riots in the streets if there's a second referendum. This is an absolutely crystal clear example of someone hypocritically making up the rules to serve their own political interests.

Ideological purges

The resignation of Ivan Rogers as UK ambassador to the EU over the shambolic mess the Tories are making of Brexit provoked Nigel Farage into calling for a mass ideological purge of the civil service.

Like the independence of the judiciary (that Farage also hates), the concept of a politically neutral civil service is one of the cornerstones of the British political system. The idea of a politically motivated purge of the civil service in order to enforce ideological conformity is utterly abhorrent.

History tells us that it's when politicians start with the ideological purges to eradicate their opponents from parliament, the civil service, universities and the media, that totalitarianism really starts to take hold.

The thing to be thankful for is that Nigel Farage doesn't (yet?) have the political power to achieve his totalitarian ambitions. He can't sack the judiciary and he can't conduct an ideological purge of the civil service because he's nothing but a tinpot dictator with only as much political power as the mainstream media afford him with their endless uncritical coverage of his political extremism.

A "Little Hitler"

According to the top definition on Urban Dictionary the slang term "Little Hitler" refers to "a self-important tosspot who thinks he's in charge. Someone who makes up arbitrary and/or self-serving rules and has a tantrum if they aren't obeyed".

There should be absolutely no doubt in the mind of anyone but the most fervent of Ukippers that Nigel Farage fits the description of "self-important tosspot who thinks he's in charge".
Just consider his foot-stamping tantrum over the judiciary favouring parliamentary sovereignty over autocratic dictatorship; the way he makes up his views on narrow referendum victories entirely to suit his own self-interest; his impotent demands to be made ambassador to the US; and his calls for the ideological purges of his political opponents to begin.

Farage is pretty much the (urban) dictionary definition of a "Little Hitler".

A "Big Hitler"?

The good thing about "Little Hitlers" is that they don't have the political power to enforce the dictatorships they pine for. They can't sack the judiciary, purge the civil service or turn our schools and universities into political indoctrination camps because they don't have the political power to do any of it, they just have one impotent tantrum after another over such issues.

The problem of course is that "Little Hitlers" sometimes become "Big Hitlers". Dictators usually steal political power by force (military coups, fascist uprisings ...), but sometimes they're handed the path to absolute political power by the electorate.

History tells us that it doesn't take anything like a majority of the electorate to turn a "Little Hitler" into a "Big Hitler".

Take Adolf Hitler himself as an example. In 1932 the Nazis won 192 out of the 586 seats in the German Reichstag, which was nowhere near enough to form a majority government. After a couple of months of political wrangling the German political establishment agreed to let Hitler serve as Chancellor, and the rest, as they say, is history.

The 1932 election was the last free and fair election anywhere in Germany until 1949, and the last open election for the whole country until the post-reunification election of 1990.

Less than one in three German voters supported Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in the 1932 Federal Election, but that was all Hitler needed in order to seize power for himself and immediately set about with the political repression, attacks on the judiciary, ideological purges of the civil service and education system in order to eradicate political opposition and continually strengthen his grip on political power.

Nigel Farage has already made it absolutely clear that he's a "Little Hitler" who would just love to sack the judiciary, scrap parliamentary democracy and instigate a politically motivated purge of the civil service.

It's obviously unfair to say that if he were given the political power he craves, that Farage would eventually go as far as Hitler did. However Farage's is clearly identifiable as a potential dictator by his utter contempt for stuff like parliamentary sovereignty and the rule of law, and his burning desire to see the ideological purge of his political opponents set in motion.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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David Cameron the innocent victim!

It took a few days of excruciating floundering from David Cameron and his party, but it's now clear that the Tory narrative on the Panama Papers has been set.

The ludicrous story they've concocted is that the Tories and the super-rich people caught up in the Panama Papers leak are the virginal innocent victims who have done nothing wrong, and the real villains in all of this are any ordinary members of the public who think they have a right to question the conduct of their Lords and masters!

The dodgy Tory donors

The Panama Papers have revealed that a whole host of major Tory party donors had links to offshore companies listed on the books of Mossack Fonseca these included:

• Anthony Bamford: £4 million in Tory donations, made into an unelected Tory peer in 2013.

• David Rowland: £3.8 million in Tory donations, former party treasurer.

• Fleming Family: Over £400,000 in Tory donations, including direct donations to David Cameron

• Juniper Equities Trading: £250,000 loan to the Tory party from an offshore fund with an opaque ownership structure. It is still not known who was behind this donation.

• Tony Buckingham: £100,000 donation to the Tories.

Cameron the "victim"

The Tory MPs and the right-wing press stumbled around for a while without a narrative to deflect criticism, leaving David Cameron to get backed into a corner. Following days of evasive answers and extraordinary press releases about how his offshore dealings during his time as an MP were supposedly a "private matter", Cameron eventually had to admit that he held a five figure stake in his fathers' dodgy offshore business which he never declared on the Parliamentary register of Members' Interests for nine years as an MP.

After all of this excruciating floundering, Tory party HQ eventually settled on the quite extraordinary story that David Cameron and the Tories are somehow the innocent victims in the Panama Papers scandal, and the villains are any ordinary members of the public with the temerity to complain about it. Here is a short selection of some of the ludicrous statements that Tory apologists have come up with:

"You often hear of people being trapped in poverty, but it's also possible to be trapped in wealth. This is David Cameron's fate" - Charles Moore, Daily Telegraph

This is shockingly offensive drivel to anybody who understands the deliberate upwards redistribution of wealth that has gone on as a consequence of Tory ideological austerity and how it has resulted in ordinary people suffering the most severe income declines since records began, reduced to food bank dependency, hit with ludicrously harsh benefits sanctions, unfairly thrown off disability benefits, rendered homeless (homelessness has risen dramatically since 2010) and even in death.

Poverty is a trap that can, and does, result in premature death. Wealth is not a trap.

David Cameron isn't under fire because he's wealthy. He's under fire because he deliberately hid his shareholding in his father's offshore business off the Parliamentary Register of Members' Interests and then spent four days obfuscating about it before finally admitting it. The problem isn't that he's rich, it's that he's dishonest.

"Shouldn't the Prime Minister’s critics snap out of their synthetic indignation and admit that they hate anyone with a hint of wealth in their life?" Tory MP Alan Duncan - Parliamentary question

This is an almost perfect example of the sanctimonious Tory "class war" ideology, where the Tories and their super-rich backers are always beyond reproach, and anyone who dares complain about anything they do must be vermin from "the lower orders" who are just filled with petty jealously and should damned well know their place.

According to Alan Duncan's smug Tory "logic", anyone who does have "a hint of wealth" who also feels entitled to be angry that David Cameron failed to register his significant offshore shareholding on the MP's Register of Interests for nine years must be a self-hater who is bitterly jealous of their own wealth!

Another thing to note is Alan Duncan's use of the term "synthetic indignation", which is quite extraordinary given the performance of Tory MP Charles Walker who gave a ludicrous display of synthetic indignation on BBC The Daily Politics show, painting David Cameron as the innocent victim of a "bullying" campaign, only to give the game away completely at the end by getting caught by the camera aiming a triumphant wink at his fellow Tory MP on the panel.

It's absolutely extraordinary that the Tories have simultaneously decided to cynically play the synthetic moral indignation card in defence of David Cameron, then smear anyone still asking questions about his failure to declare his offshore shareholding for nine years as an MP as being guilty of "synthetic indignation".

Following on from his broad-brush smear against anyone with the temerity to question their Tory betters, Alan Duncan went on to claim that non-millionaires are "under-achievers" which is a perfect example of the foul-minded Tory fallacy of natural economic justice (the idea that rich people are rich because they're virtuous, and poor people are poor because they're worthless scum).

"May I tell the Prime Minister that he should not be ashamed that he had the good fortune to be born into a well-off family" - Michael Fabricant, Parliamentary statement

This one is just absurd. It must surely be one of the weakest and most obvious straw-man fallacies ever uttered in parliament. Nobody at all is saying that David Cameron should be ashamed of being born into a wealthy family. The complaint is that he deliberately hid some of his assets off the Parliamentary Register of Members' Interests when he couldn't possibly have imagined that nobody at all in Britain could have reasonably have thought that such a shareholding might "influence his actions, speeches or votes in Parliament, or actions taken in his or her capacity as a Member of Parliament". It's completely obvious that he refused to declare the interest precisely because he thought people would think that, which means he was in clear breach of the MP's code of conduct.

The straw-man tactic (deliberately mischaracterising your opponents argument as something utterly facile and then criticising that, in place of what has actually been said) is truly one of the weakest and most contemptible debating tactics known to humanity.

It just goes to show how far the standards of public debate have fallen that Tory MPs think that they can get away with such blatantly fallacious debating tactics, and how much utter contempt they must have for "the lower orders" that they think we'd all just mindlessly accept such drivel and stop complaining.

Conclusion

The Panama Papers leak has revealed that the Tory party are funded by people with proven interests in a load of dodgy offshore companies and that they're led by a guy who cynically concealed his own offshore interests by deliberately omitting to mention them on the Parliamentary Register of Members' Interests for nine years. However, the Tory party are riddled with such utter contempt for "the lower orders" that they're trying to spin this situation to claim that they're the innocent victims and the any ordinary members of the public who dare to continue complaining are a pack of bullies motivated by nothing more than jealously!

The big thing isn't the fact they're trying to lie. distort, mislead and spin their way out of this situation. That's to be expected because the establishment class are trained to do this from a young age. The issue is the shocking level of contempt that these people clearly have for "the lower orders" that they think that they can fool us into thinking that they're the poor innocent victims and that ordinary members of the public are the contemptible bastards for daring to continue asking questions of their betters.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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Is it time for the public to make David Cameron resign?

When the first details of the "Panama Papers" were released, David Cameron thought he could bluster his way out of it. He thought that he could just recycle the same tired old Tory rhetoric about getting tough on tax-dodging, and tell the public how the use of secretive offshore shell companies is "not morally acceptable". He thought he could put on this kind of performance for a little while until the public furore died down, then go back to doing nothing serious about the tax-dodging issue, as he'd been doing for the last six years.

As more and more of the dodgy details of his fathers' offshore business empire came out (like the fact it never paid a penny of tax on its UK profits for 30 years) David Cameron thought that he could stonewall the public with evasiveness, outright refusals to answer simple questions, and absurd press releases about how his financial affairs are supposedly a "private matter".

The problem for David Cameron is that the financial affairs of our elected officials (and their immediate families) are not actually a "private matter" at all. The reason the Parliamentary Register of Members' Financial Interests exists is so that the public can see whether our elected officials have financial conflicts of interest when they are making or voting on legislation.

Once a person decides to run for public office (any kind of elected position from lowly parish councillor to a Member of Parliament, cabinet minister or Prime Minister) they are obligated to accept the rule that they must declare their financial interests, meaning that their personal financial arrangements are no longer a "private matter".

This isn't just the opinion of some "leftie" blogger. It's a fact. It's part of the job description of all politicians in democratically accountable societies.

On Thursday the 7th of April (three days after the Panama Papers crisis erupted) David Cameron finally admitted that he personally benefited from his father's dodgy offshore business interests when he sold £31,500 worth of shares in January 2010 (just months before he became Prime Minister).

This admission was made in a specially arranged ITV interview with the notoriously Tory-friendly journalist Robert Peston, who even allowed David Cameron to make pathetic appeals for public sympathy with claims it had been "a difficult few days".

The worst aspect of Peston's interview (and an awful lot of the subsequent mainstream media press coverage), is that Cameron hasn't been asked whether he ever considered declaring his shares in Blairmore (or the profits from his sale) on the Register of Members' Financial Interests.

A look at the specific rules shows how ridiculously lax they are when it comes to MPs shareholdings. According to articles 9a and 9b of the code of conduct, an MP can apparently hold shares in a company without declaring it on the register as long as the value of the shares does not exceed 100% of their parliamentary salary, or 15% of the share capital of the company. This means that a front bench minister could hold £130,000 worth of shares in a huge array of different companies without specifically having to declare any of them under article 9 of the rules!

In my view this staggeringly lax rule on MPs shareholdings needs to be changed to a much lower figure, something like the £500 limit on gifts, or the £1,500 limit on benefits (freebies like tickets to events).

There is however one other rule that needs to be taken into account when considering David Cameron's failure to register his shares in Blairmore (or the proceeds of their sale), which can be found in section 57 of the code of conduct:

"It is sometimes appropriate to register shareholdings falling outside Categories 9a and 9b. In considering whether to do so, Members should have regard to the definition of the main purpose of the Register: "to provide information of any financial interest or other material benefit which a Member receives which might reasonably be thought by others to influence his or her actions, speeches or votes in Parliament, or actions taken in his or her capacity as a Member of Parliament". If a Member considers that any shareholding which he or she holds falls within this definition, the Member should register the shareholding under Category 11."

Maybe David Cameron is so wealthy that he thinks that a £12,500 investment that he sold for £31,500 is such an insignificant matter that nobody could possibly believe it could have any influence over his actions as an MP?

I imagine that many of us would struggle to imagine a scenario in which a five figure financial investment would be so insignificant to us as to have no influence at all on our actions. I guess it just shows what a different world people like David Cameron must occupy if they believe that five figure investments are far too insignificant to even bother registering, and that nobody in Britain could possibly believe that such investments might have any influence over their actions.

In light of David Cameron's admission it becomes clear that every single time David Cameron has talked-tough about tax-dodging as Prime Minister (like in 2012 when he slammed Jimmy Carr's tax-dodging escapades as "morally wrong") he damned well knew that he'd personally benefited from selling a stake in his father's offshore business empire, but he was completely confident that nobody would ever see his hypocrisy because he'd deliberately failed to register his shares (or their sale) on the Register of Members' Financial Interests, and because he assumed that his offshore dealings would always remain secret.

The important issue here isn't David Cameron's hypocrisy - if MPs and Prime Ministers could be removed from office for hypocrisy, David Cameron (and several of his cabinet minsters) would have been forced out of office long ago. 

The important issue isn't David Cameron's dishonesty either. He's got away with telling one lie after another for years, completely safe in the knowledge that the worst that would ever happen to him is the sending of a stern letter by the UK statistics authority.

The important issue is that David Cameron deliberately failed to declare some of his financial interests even though it's not remotely possible that he could have thought there would have been no public interest in his offshore investments.

It's absolutely clear that the reason David Cameron decided not to declare his offshore investments is because he knew perfectly well that such an investment "might reasonably be thought by others to influence his or her actions, speeches or votes in Parliament, or actions taken in his or her capacity as a Member of Parliament", which means that he was in clear violation of article 57 of the code of conduct for nine years.

This issue is a matter of public standards. If David Cameron is allowed to simply brush off his failure to declare his financial interests in his fathers' offshore business empire for nine years of his parliamentary career as some kind of oversight, or try to argue that "it wasn't against the exact letter of the law - so it's OK"* - the public would be giving our acquiescence to more of this kind of moral impropriety in the future.

If David Cameron doesn't have the moral decency to resign over this issue (which no doubt he doesn't), the British public have a duty to make him resign, otherwise we'd be sending the message to all the other self-serving MPs in parliament that they're absolutely fine to continue owning and not declaring significant chunks of offshore business empires (as long as the value of their chunk does not exceed their annual parliamentary salary).

The people of Iceland have shown that it's possible to force a Prime Minister's resignation over financial impropriety, so it's not beyond the bounds of reason that David Cameron could be forced to resign if the public pressure became strong enough.

What we can do

There is going to be a protest outside Downing Street calling for David Cameron's resignation. You could sign up to the protest on the Facebook page, but more importantly you could spread the word by using the "invite" function to invite anyone you think might be interested in joining in, or inviting other people to join in. The more people who know about this protest, the bigger it's likely to be.

Write to your MP to ask that they support a move to introduce significantly lower limits on MPs shareholdings so that scandals like David Cameron's Blairmore shares can never arise again.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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* Coincidentally the"it wasn't against the exact letter of the law - so it's OK" argument for David Cameron not declaring his significant offshore investments on the Register of Members' Financial Interests is precisely the same argument used by tax-dodgers to justify their use of elaborate tax avoidance schemes.

Why you should use your critical thinking skills, whatever the information source

  
I'll begin this article with an admission that I made a mistake. I always try to be careful that the infographics I create for social media are completely accurate (or clearly marked as satire when they're jokes), however on Sunday 30th of November 2014 I shared an infographic made by someone else without properly fact checking it (the one in the article header).

It turns out that the image I shared was slightly misleading. The nine images of incredibly sparsely attended debates in parliament were perfectly accurate, but the two below claiming to be debates about MPs pay and expenses were just stock images of the House of Commons. The infographic in question was then cited in a Spectator article by Isabel Hardman entitled "The menace of Memes: How pictures can paint a thousand lies".

I apologised as soon as I realised that I'd made a mistake in sharing a partially inaccurate image, but also took note of the fact that Isabel Hardman's article was also misleading for the fact that that it implied that the image was deliberately inaccurate (made in bad faith), rather than the result of a quite obvious mistake (made in good faith), and also because it made the ludicrous argument that so few MPs bother to turn up to some debates because "it is more constructive to be outside the Chamber during those sessions". The author casually dismissed all of the perfectly accurate pictures of incredibly sparsely attended parliamentary sessions (on the war in Afghanistan, child sex abuse, preventing knife crime, drugs laws, the effects of Iain Duncan Smith's brutal welfare "reforms" on disabled people, the living wage, recognition of Palestine, tenancy reform, and Syrian refugees) as if they were probably just unconstructive waste-of-time type debates that might have been better had nobody bothered to attend them at all!

Had Isabel Hardman done the vaguest research on how someone might have mistakenly concluded that the two stock images were what they were claimed to be, she would have easily found this article on the BBC News website, and this article on the Daily Telegraph website which both lazily used old stock images to illustrate their articles about parliamentary debates on MPs pay and MPs expenses.

The following day Isabel Hardman was invited to participate in a BBC Politics "debate" on social media images. I use the word "debate" in inverted commas because the "debate" consisted of Isabel Hardman, three MPs (the subject of the criticism) and the host, who showed her own bias by incessantly repeating the word "misleading" over and again. There were five individuals lined up against social media, and not a single representative to stand up for social media. It's hardly possible to conceive a less balanced "debate".

The BBC Daily Politics "debate" didn't make the slightest effort to draw any kind of contrast between "misleading" social media content and accurate social media content (of which there is lots), and neither did it admit that the source for one of the "misleading" images was almost certainly a misleadingly illustrated article about an MPs expenses debate on the BBC's own website!

The general tone of the whole "debate" was that social media is untrustworthy compared to politicians and paid journalists. Isabel Hardman even complained that "people trust the Internet more than they trust newspapers or politicians".

After stuff like the Hillsborough lies and cover-up, the "sexed up" Iraq dossier, the countless parliamemtary expenses scamming scandals, phone hacking, David Cameron's countless lies about the NHS and the national debt, the "misplaced" dossier about the Westminster paedophile ring, and the shockingly biased mainstream media campaign against Scottish independence - is it any wonder that people are more inclined to assume good faith when it comes to a picture their friend has shared on Facebook, than the utterances of a career politician or a paid journalist?

Isabel Hardman came across as a lot less condescending in the BBC interview than she did in her Spectator article, and she freely admitted that "the [9] pictures at the top did actually represent the debates", so it's clear that nine out of the eleven images used in the infographic were perfectly fair representations. The problem was that (like the Daily Politics presenter) she fell into the trap of assuming bad faith. She assumed that the creator of the image had deliberately set out to mislead, when the truth is self-evident: The creator of the infographic was clearly a bit naive in assuming that the mainstream press articles about the MPs pay and expenses debates were accurately illustrated, rather than lazily blathered with old stock images of completely unrelated parliamentary debates.

Even though the Daily Politics debate was so one-sided and openly hostile to social media I'm glad I watched it for the fact that the intensely smug Labour MP Jamie Reed made a truly remarkable admission that just goes to show how the current crop of career politicians consider their roles in our society. He said "you get business done on the telephone, you get business done face-to-face, you really don't achieve much in the chamber". Essentially this is an admission of what many people already know: Virtually all of the important decisions in our so-called democracy are made without democratic scrutiny in unrecorded "chats" between government ministers, civil servants, unelected lords, professional consultants, corporate lobbyists and the like, while the House of Commons serves only as an anachronistic rubber-stamping process, where MPs are free to completely ignore the actual debate then flood into the chamber at the end to cast their votes in the way they have been instructed to by their parties.

In my view MPs should have to sit through at least 80% of the actual debate if they are to be allowed to vote on the issue, and all "chats" between politicians and people like professional consultants and corporate lobbyists should be recorded so that they can be subjected to democratic scrutiny. Politicians and their friends in the media certainly won't be earning back any public trust simply by conducting a hopelessly biased and one-sided attack against social media, instead of fundamentally reforming the way they go about their own business.

After cautioning against making bad faith assumptions it would be wrong of me to state categorically that the reason for this hopelessly one-sided "debate" on social media was the journalists' abject fear that social media is allowing citizen journalists to spring up and provide competition to the professional journalists of the mainstream media like them, and the politicians' fear that social media can be used as a tool to hold corrupt/lazy/incompetent politicians to account. Let's assume the best and say that the BBC has simply strayed so far from it's public service remit that there wasn't anyone at all within the entire Daily Politics production team capable of thinking that an effort should have been made to find someone to represent social media in order to add a bit of balance to the "debate".

The fact that a debate about social media without a single representative of social media is considered acceptable output by the mainstream media just goes to show how unfit they are to be moral arbiters of anything. At least when you follow someone on Twitter or follow a page like mine on Facebook, you know we're opinionated, but at least we're not trying to hide our biases behind a reputation for neutrality that has long since been burned like a pile of old tyres that a farmer can't be arsed to get rid of properly.

To conclude I'll return to my admission of my mistake at the beginning of this article, and the fact that I made a public apology for it on my Facebook page as soon as I could. I think this is where a clear distinction can be made. The BBC were totally unprepared to admit their role in misleadingly attributing a completely unrelated stock image to a debate on MPs expenses (which would have changed the nature of the debate from "misleading social media to the lazy use of stock images on BBC News articles). Career politicians are notoriously unwilling to admit their mistakes (best evidenced by the typical politician's apology where they apologise for "any offense that may have been caused", rather than actually apologising for the offensive thing they've said/done). If it was the Spectator, or any other mainstream media publication making the mistake, we all know the apology would be hidden away in minuscule text on page 94 in a tiny box underneath an advert for dishwasher tablets that appears weeks or months later, not in a high profile statement that is posted as soon as the person becomes aware that they've made a mistake.

Perhaps one of the great things about social media is that it frees the individual to follow news from people they have learned to trust, rather than allowing a single newspaper or broadcaster to drip-feed their biased new agenda to them. Hence huge numbers of people have been made aware of things like the TTIP corporate power grab, the WCA disability witch hunt or the Tory "gagging law" through social media sources like my Another Angry Voice page, 38 Degrees or Atos Miracles, not through the biased and agenda driven coverage presented by the mainstream media.

Of course mistakes will be made on social media, but it is how people deal with their mistakes that is a true indicator of their trustworthiness, not the slickness of their presentation or the unanimity of their so-called "debates". 


 Another Angry Voice  is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only sources of income for  Another Angry Voice  are small donations from people who see some value in my work. If you appreciate my efforts and you could afford to make a donation, it would be massively appreciated.

Update: Two things have come to my attention. The Spectator journalist is actually called Isabel Hardman, not Hartman - I have updated the article to correct this spelling error (apologies to her for the spelling mistake). It has also come to my attention that Isabel Hardman is a BBC employee who has actually worked on the Daily Politics show, something that was not mentioned at any point during the (2 BBC journalists and 3 establishment politicians vs 0 social media representatives) "debate".

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