In 2014 Tory Home Secretary Theresa May pushed through the outrageous "Immigration Act" which was intended to create a "Hostile Environment" for anyone without the certification to prove that they had a right to live in Britain.
Toty Hostile Environment was eventually used to deny housing, employment, banking services, social security, and even life-saving medical treatment to Black british citizens of the Windrush generation.
Yes, Theresa May bears ultimate responsibility for the Hostile Environment, (and for making it even worse in 2016), but the Lib-Dems absolutely loved it at the time, in fact one of their MPs Mark Hunter actually served as one of the "tellers for the ayes" in the parliamentary vote!
But taking the Golden Biscuit prize for duplicitous posturing is current Lib-Dem leadership candidate Ed Davey who published a Windrush Day article pinning the blame entirely on the Tories, and whitewashing the fact that he himself voted in favour of Tory hostile immigration legislation in 2014!
It just goes to show how utterly degraded the standard of political discourse has become that we're surrounded by duplicitous liars on all sides, from the lying Brextremists who dragged us into absolute chaos via a tide of shockingly dishonest propaganda on one side, to the entirely unapologetic Lib-Dems on the other who whitewash their crimes against the British people (Hostile Environment, austerity fanaticism, wage repression, ruinous public service cuts, welfare vandalism, erosion of Legal Aid and the judicial system, shockingly illiberal secret courts, unpayable student debts, the slowest economic recovery in Centuries, and so much more) rather than fessing up and apologising to the nation for what they did.
And the worst thing of all is the tendency of these duplicitous liars to climb up onto their moral high horses and sneer down at those of us who refuse to buy into their despicable lies, or believe their Orwellian whitewashing of their utterly malicious track records.
According to them, the people who actively voted in favour of the Tory hostile environment they're now carping about from the sidelines, they're the reputable social progressives, and us on the left who opposed hostile environment all along are the partisan political militants!
I'm tempted to say you couldn't make it up, but the ever-duplicitous Lib-Dems already have.
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Theresa May stood at the dispatch box and lied. She lied that the decision to destroy immigration landing cards was taken by the Labour Party in 2009 when it wasn't. She lied because she was desperately trying to deflect criticism over her grotesque 'hostile environment' policies that led to the dehumanisation, detention, denial of rights and even and deportation of Commonwealth British citizens. And most of all she lied because she thought she could get away with it. If the British press had any instinct to hold the UK government to account they would have looked into her claim, immediately found it to be contradicted by the previous day's Home Office admission that the documents were destroyed in October 2010, and run a story criticising the Prime Minister for lying to the House of Commons, and for cynically misleading the British public in order to deflect negative attention away from herself. But that's not what happened. That's not what happened at all. Instead of investigating her claim, the BBC and various other mainstream media outlets uncritically parroted her lie, and helped her misleadingly deflect the Windrush criticism onto others. Of course the billionaire owned right-wing propaganda rags and the legions of Tory social media propaganda accounts got in on the misdirection act, but the behaviour of the BBC is much more problematic. They didn't just make Theresa May's lie the number one story on their website, they also uncritically regurgitated her lie into millions of homes and workplaces in TV and radio news segments. When the state broadcaster refuses to investigate even the most blatant of government lies, and instead uncritically parrots the lie into the homes and onto the devices of millions of people, they're not worthy of the name journalists, or news reporters, they're nothing but impotent court stenographers, and cynical mind manipulators. But let's not forget the real issue here. The real issue isn't that a batch of documents were destroyed and when. It's that in 2014 Theresa May introduced horrific new anti-immigrant rules giving the government the power to deny employment, deny health care, deny benefits and pensions that people have paid for through decades of National Insurance contributions, and to make British citizens live in constant fear of imprisonment and deportation to places many of them last saw when they were toddlers. The reason she inflicted this appalling state of limbo on thousands of British citizens was just to grub a few votes off UKIP by appealing to the extreme-right ultranationalist anti-immigrant demographic. Nobody in the Tory party complained about this blatant Faragisation of the Tory party and the UK government back in 2014, and even now still none of the supposedly more liberal One Nation Tories dares to stand up and criticise what Theresa May has done in their name. Theresa May brought in these harsh new rules in 2014, and she was undeniably warned at the time by Diane Abbott that such rules could be used against British Commonwealth citizens without paperwork, but May just evaded the question and waffled on about whatever she wanted to, in the way we've all become all-too-familiar with since she became Prime Minister. If the BBC was up to it's job it would have reported that Theresa May lied. If the so called free press that are not constrained by impartiality rules were up to their jobs they would be calling for Theresa May's resignation for introducing such disgusting rules, then lying to parliament and the public to try to deflect the negative attention. And if Theresa May had the slightest shred of personal integrity she's would have already shown her contrition by tendering her resignation. None of that has happened. None of that is likely to happen. But the more the media and the political establishment class circle the wagons to protect their own elitist class from the rest of us, the more furious the British public are going to get until something gives.
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Back in 2014 the then Home Secretary Theresa May introduced new immigration rules designed to create a 'hostile environment' for immigrants. The introduction of these harsh new immigration rules was clearly a ploy to appeal to the extreme-right ultranationalist demographic, and it coincided with a significant upsurge in anti-immigrant rhetoric from the Tories, and especially from Theresa May.
In light of the Windrush scandal the Tories simply cannot pretend that they were not warned about the serious consequences of this piece of legislation. They were warned, and these warnings are recorded on the Hansard parliamentary record. During the debate Diane Abbot raised concerns that these harsh new powers could have negative impacts on could have on "people who are British nationals, but appear as if they might be immigrants" (people like the Windrush generation and other perfectly legal migrants from the Commonwealth). Theresa May completely dodged this question with the kind of evasive waffle we've all become so familiar with since she became Prime Minister. The Lib-Dem MP Sarah Teather (who went on to quit parliament in disgust at the grotesque Lib-Dem colusion with the Tories between 2010 and 2015) raised concerns about people being denied health care.
These concerns have been totally vindicated as it's turned out that Windrush immigrants who have lived in the UK since childhood and paid tax their entire working lives have been denied healthcare, including life-or-death cancer treatments. Others to speak out were the The Green MP Caroline Lucas who raised concerns about the shocking 32% error rate in Home Office deportation decisions, John McDonnell who spoke about the appalling conditions in immigration prisons, and Pete Wishart of the SNP who called it a "dreadful" and "terrible" piece of legislation and concluded that the Tories might as well have had Nigel Farage at the dispatch box rather than Theresa May because "this is nothing other than a UKIP bill". Jeremy Corbyn was the last of the MPs who bravely stood up in opposition to the vile Blue-kip anti-immigrant Juggernaut, here's what he said:
"I will vote against the Bill on Third Reading for a large number of reasons. We have ordained that the Home Secretary will have executive power to take away citizenship in the future and to create a generation of stateless people. The handing over of that power is, I think, a very dangerous thing for any Parliament to do.
We have a number of other serious concerns about the Bill, such as those covered in the points raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) about the forced removal of people; the death of Jimmy Mubenga, which was mentioned by the hon. Member for Brent Central (Sarah Teather); the use of the detention system; the denial of health care access; the problems of forcing landlords to become agents of the Home Office; and the reality of life for those people who have legitimately sought asylum in Britain and are starving on the streets of our cities because we do not have a system in place to give them proper support.
The Bill does not answer any of those problems. It is based on prejudice and headline chasing and has nothing to do with the real needs of people who are desperately seeking support, help and assistance rather than the cold behaviour shown by the Government today."
The bill was voted on immediately after Corbyn's passionate appeal for sanity in the face of headline chasing, UKIP-appealing, extreme-right, anti-immigrant lunacy from the government. Only 18 MPs (including the two tellers) voted against the bill. Now that the disgusting consequences of this grotesque legislation are becoming more clear (especially in relation to the Windrush generation who have been imprisoned, made homeless, denied work, denied health care, and even deported as a consequence) it's very important to pay tribute to the 18 brave MPs who stood up and voted against this travesty of a bill, while the rest of the House of Commons blithely went along with this overt display of blue-kip extremism by Theresa May. Diane Abbott (Labour) Jeremy Corbyn (Labour) Jonathan Edwards (Plaid Cymru) Mark Lazarowicz (Labour) John Leech (Liberal Democrat) Elfyn Llwyd (Plaid Cymru) Caroline Lucas (Green) Angus MacNeil (SNP) Fiona Mactaggart (Labour) John McDonnell (Labour) Angus Robertson (SNP) Dennis Skinner (Labour) Sarah Teather (Liberal Democrat) David Ward (Liberal Democrat) Mike Weir (SNP) Eilidh Whiteford (SNP) Hywel Williams (Plaid Cymru) Pete Wishart (SNP)
Note that all three Plaid Cymru, and the one Green MP all voted against the bill. Five of the six SNP representatives voted against it. Just six MPs from the Labour left voted against it (three of whom are now the leader, shadow Home Secretary, and Shadow Chancellor), and just three of the 57 Lib-Dems voted against it (one who resigned in disgust in 2015 and two who lost their seats in the furious public backlash against their party's collusion with the Tories at the 2015 General Election). Not a single Tory MP voted against it.
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Sometimes the best strategy isn't to campaign with everything you've got, but to just sit quietly for a while and allow your debating opponents to make absolute tits of themsleves. The angry Little Englander ranting on about how much he hates Scotland and the Scottish people in the video below is a perfect example of someone making their opponents' argument for them. Before you click on the video to see for yourself please don't think that this guy is representative of everyone south of the border. Many of us wish the Scottish people all the best as they seek freedom from the corrupt out-of-touch elitists who run the Westminster establishment. I supported Scottish independence the last time around, and I continue to support it now. My only regret is that there's practically no chance of my beloved Yorkshire ever establishing an opportunity to escape the elitist Westminster cabal too. This guy doesn't represent all English people, but his hate-fuelled and obscenity laden rhetoric is definitely representative of a large and increasingly vocal minority in England. An obnoxious, ignorant and bigoted extreme-right minority who have been massively empowered by Brexit to such an extent that their right-wing newspapers now feel free to publish articles calling Nicola Sturgeon a "traitor" who deserves to be beheaded for sticking to her manifesto commitment to offer Scotland another referendum if they face being dragged out of the EU against their will.
The obnoxiousness and bigotry in the video clip are very easy to see, but the ignorance is perhaps the most obvious thing of all. Scotland isn't ruled by "a little tiny fucking country like Belgium", that's such an ignorant misrepresentation of the nature of the EU it's ridiculous. The problem for Scotland is that they are controlled by Westminster, and they face being dragged out of the EU, and out of the Single Market by a bunch of rabidly right-wing English Tories. Scotland is being slow-marched towards a catastrophic nuclear Brexit by Theresa May and the Tories despite the fact that Scotland voted heavily against Brexit. The furious ranting of the Little Englander in the video isn't actually all that much different from Theresa May's arrogant attitude that the Scottish people should just do as they're damned well told by the English.
The problem for Scotland isn't that they're ruled over by Belgium (?!), it's that the Tories have rigged Westminster so that Scottish MPs can't influence English issues, but English MPs can, and do, vote on Scottish issues!
What better propaganda for independence is there than a bunch of furious right-wing English people expressing how much they hate Scotland, and telling the Scottish people that they should just bow down and do as they're told by their English lords and masters?
If Scotland does vote for independence they can free themselves from the malign and corrupting influence of English Tories, and then they can decide their own future as a nation instead of having it decided for them by Theresa May and a load of English Tory toffs in Westminster. And if in the process of breaking away from Westminster control they upset furious hate-filled Little Englanders like the guy in the video, then that's clearly an added bonus isn't it?
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A report from Spinwatch has identified numerous schools, local councils and police forces that have been describing anti-fracking protests as "extremism", "extremists" and even "terrorist groups".
Labelling anti-fracking as "extremism" and "terrorism" The Spinwatch report identifies examples from various parts of the UK including North Yorkshire, Merseyside, Dorset and West Sussex. The unifying theme in all of these examples is that the documents and presentations equating anti-fracking protests with terrorism and extreme-right fanaticism are all linked with the Tory government's Prevent Strategy, which was signed off by Theresa May when she was Home Secretary. Of course we know that the Tories are totally in hock to the fracking industry, so it serves their purposes to have their opponents labelled as "extremists" and "terrorists", but surely nobody in their right mind thinks that it's acceptable for multiple schools, councils and police forces to equate peaceful anti-fracking protests with savage murderers like ISIS and extreme-right fanatics like the MP killer Thomas Mair. One of the worst examples of these smears against anti-fracking groups was identified in the Prevent policy of Chesswood School in West Sussex. The executive summary of their prevent policy identifies fracking protests as an "extremist ideology" associated with "terrorist groups" and equates environmental opposition to fracking with Al Qaida and far-right extremism.
British values The Chesswood School Prevent document then goes on to define "extremist" as "vocal or active opposition to British values". Whatever their opinion on the merits/harms of fracking, I'm pretty sure that most reasonable people would accept that anti-fracking protests consist of vocal or active opposition to fracking, not a vocal or active opposition to British values. The Chesswood School Prevent strategy then goes on to define "British values" as respect for "democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, mutual respect for and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs, and those without faith". The right to peaceful protest is an absolutely essential part of individual liberty. It's ludicrous to imagine that it's possible to have a free and liberal society without the right to protest against the actions of the government, major institutions or other individuals. If anyone is guilty of disregarding "British values" it's clearly people who insist on smearing anti-fracking protesters as extremists and terrorists simply for opposing what they consider to be unacceptable environmental destruction. Anyone who denies the right to protest such issues is obviously denying individual liberty, and clearly opposing the Chesswood School definition of "British values".
This concerted effort to define opposition to fracking as "extremism" and "terrorism" ties in with another of Theresa May's appalling right-wing authoritarian schemes.
If Theresa May's extremism policy becomes law, then law-abiding citizens could be banned from attending protests or public events, and have all of their online activities pre-vetted by the police.
All that would need to be shown in order to impose these restrictions on people's human rights is that there is a suspicion that the individual could become involved in "harmful activities".
Theresa May's definition of "harmful activities" includes "a risk of public disorder", "a risk of harassment, alarm or distress" and the extremely vague "threat to the functioning of democracy".
So if Theresa May gets her way people could have their rights to free speech, free assembly, the presumption of innocence and peaceful protest scrapped simply because some police officer says they suspect the individual may at some future point cause "alarm or distress" to specified or unspecified persons.
With such extraordinarily low thresholds it's easy to see how the government could use Theresa May's extremism orders to shut down legitimate peaceful protests. All it would take is for a police officer or fracking company employee to claim "distress" because of an anti-fracking protest, then individual law-abiding anti-fracking protesters could be rounded up and stripped of their human rights, banned from protesting again, and forced into a monitoring regime to censor everything they write on the Internet.
Before he resigned in shame after his EU referendum gamble backfired David Cameron summed up the objectives of this policy when he said that "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'."
It's extraordinary that a serving Prime Minister could get away with expressing such a sinister intention to interfere in the lives of law-abiding citizens, but the mainstream press gave him a free pass on it.
The mainstream media also gave a free pass to Theresa May who is the architect of this policy of stripping law abiding citizens of their human rights, and now this fanatical right-wing authoritarian is the Prime Minister, and still the mainstream media refuse to draw sufficient attention to her autocratic tendencies and her outright contempt for human rights. Conclusion
It's impossible to not see the connection between this concerted effort to define anti-fracking protesters as "extremists" and "terrorists" and Theresa May's policy of stripping law-abiding citizens of their human rights.
The Tory party are clearly intent on serving the interests of the fracking industry. The widespread effort to brand anti-fracking protesters as "extremists" is clearly useful to the frackers, as will be the Tory policy of stripping people of their right to participate in public or online protests based on nothing more than a suspicion that "alarm" or "distress" may be caused.
You'd have to be staggeringly naive to imagine that the mainstream press would put up a fight to protect our human rights from this next Tory assault, especially given the way Theresa May's appalling Snoopers' Charter drifted into law with barely a whimper of opposition from the media. So it will be down to the public to stop the Tories from achieving their wet dream of labelling law-abiding citizens as "extremists" in order to criminalise peaceful protest.
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Everyone already knew that David Cameron was an inveterate liar. Of course Tony Blair told really big ones (like Iraqi WMDs for example), but Cameron's lies were so much more numerous. He lied with such regularity and such fluency that it seemed that he'd probably rather lie even when it would have been much easier to actually tell the truth.
Another thing that was obvious about Cameron was his propensity for reckless gambling. When the SNP won the huge electoral mandate they needed in order to force a Scottish independence referendum, David Cameron was quick to snatch the popular option of Devolution Max off the table and turn the referendum into an "all or nothing" gamble between complete independence, or continued Scottish subservience to Westminster rule. In the end he won that gamble, but the 55% - 45% margin of victory was a hell of a lot closer than anyone had anticipated when Cameron first dictated the terms of the bet.
In 2015 David Cameron decided to gamble again. His party was riven with divisions over the European Union and two Tory MPs had made high profile defections to UKIP. Cameron decided that the only way he could win the 2015 General Election was to put a temporary stop to the internal Tory Party civil war, and draw the UKIP thorn, by offering the hard-right the referendum on membership of the European Union that they craved so much.
The problem for David Cameron was that he had promised a referendum, which he had to deliver. It's hard to understand his thinking in deciding to hold a short sharp shock of a referendum, wedged in between the local and assembly election day in May 2016 and the summer holidays. Perhaps he was afraid of the way that the long drawn-out Scottish independence referendum gave the Yes campaign time to gain so much ground? Whatever his reasoning, the plan backfired spectacularly as the rushed campaign played straight into the hands of the simplistic "simple problem - simple solution" propaganda and crude anti-intellectualism of the right-wing Brexit campaign.
David Cameron lost his gamble, and the entire future of the UK economy will be changed irrevocably because of it. He announced his resignation immediately because he had no other choice after playing so recklessly with the future of the UK economy for his own personal advantage, and then running such a woeful strategy to boot.
It's now absolutely clear that under the current situation Brexit will result in an unwilling Scottish electorate being dragged out of Europe by the anti-European English. That's clearly an unacceptable scenario, and a second Scottish independence referendum looks like an inevitable consequence.
David Cameron didn't just lose his second big gamble with the future of the UK, in doing so he massively undermined his victory in his first big gamble with the future of the UK too.
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It's obviously impossible to write a comprehensive review of absolutely everything that happened in 2014, so if you feel that I've missed any important issues, feel free to add your views in the comments section.
In early 2014 several areas of the UK were badly hit by flooding. The reaction of the political leaders was to don wellies and utter platitudes to make it look as if they actually cared. After having announced "austerity to infinity" whilst surrounded by gold encrusted things at the back end of 2013, David Cameron changed his tune dramatically to say that "money is no object" when it comes to helping/bribing the Tory heartlands that suffered the worst of the flooding. What makes his idiotic self-contradictory rhetoric all the worse is that it was adherence to ideological austerity that caused the Tories to tear up the strategic flood defence plans and impose their heaviest cuts of all on the department responsible for maintaining and improving the UK flood defence network (DEFRA).The floods would still have happened, but without Tory ideological austerity the socio-economic damage would surely have been a whole lot less catastrophic.
On the 14th of March 2014 Tony Benn died at the age of 88. Hearing Tony Benn on my mum's kitchen radio as a child had a profound effect on me, because it was clear, even to a child, that he was one of the only politicians who was honest enough to be able to actually speak his mind rather than obscuring his utterances in a cloud of obfuscation, rhetoric and politicisms. I wrote a couple of articles about his passing: This one details some of the reasons he stood head and shoulders above his political peers, and this one details his fight against the neoliberal orthodoxy.
In June 2014 the Tories (and their very illiberal yellow sidekicks) decided to continue their insane ideologically driven "War on Drugs" by banning Khat, which is a mild stimulant used mainly by African immigrants. The decision to criminalise the use of Khat went against the advice of the governments own drugs advisers, which stated unequivocally that "the evidence of harms associated with the use of khat is insufficient to justify control and it would be inappropriate and disproportionate to classify khat under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971" [source].
It is becoming ever more obvious that the majority of the harms resulting from drug use come about as a consequence of prohibition, not as a consequence of the drugs themselves. It's sickening that the Tories and the Labour Party are both ideologically wedded to the socially and economically destructive concept of allowing the drugs trade to be run by criminals in some kind of warped, totally regulation free anarcho-capitalist experiment. There is some hope though: The Green Party MP Caroline Lucas has been pushing for rational drugs policy, and the Lib-Dem MP Norman Baker resigned on principle when Theresa May completely ignored expert advice detailing the case against the ideological "war on drugs", then insisted that it be censored out of the report.
In July 2014 the coalition government rushed through a truly horrendous piece of legislation called the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers (DRIP) bill, which was designed to allow the security services to continue mass trawling the private communications data of millions of innocent people with complete impunity. Of the 650 MPs in parliament only 51 bothered to vote against it, illustrating the fact that the true opposition to this alarmingly illiberal coalition government is made up of the SNP, Plaid Cymru, the Green Party and a couple of dozen rebellious Labour Party backbenchers. In early September 2014 I received some threats from an extreme right Facebook page calling themselves National British Resistance (which turned out to be a front for the race hate propagandist, slanderer and liar Joshua Bonehill). Within days he started ripping off my images and posting them on his own page. After I published my article detailing Bonehill's threats to have my Facebook page deleted and his theft of my images to promote his race hate agenda, a number of people reported his page for spreading racist propaganda and outright lies, resulting in his page being removed by Facebook!
The race hate propagandist, slanderer and liar Joshoa Bonehill wasn't the only person to go about nicking my pictures to drum up publicity for right-wing agendas that I strongly oppose. Several members of UKIP ripped off my images to use them as propaganda for their Thatcherite Trojan Horse party. The thing that makes this so ironic is that UKIP are the only political party ever to threaten me with legal action over supposed copyright infringement of their logo (a case that would be laughed out of court) but they're perfectly happy to continually rip off my creative content (including my logo) to promote their own agenda.
In September 2014 the EU demonstrated their abject fear of democracy by blocking a Citizens' Initiative against the TTIP corporate power grab. The organisers of the petition went ahead and launched it anyway, and it's already achieved the million signatures it needed, plus fulfilled the quotas from seven of the EU states. The EU will obviously ignore it though, because why would they let democracy get in the way of their plan to completely overwrite the democratic and legal structures of member states with pro-corporate legislation? On September 18th 2014 an incredible 85% of Scottish residents voted in the Scottish Independence Referendum. Regular readers will know that I was a strong supporter of the Scottish independence campaign because I believe in the localisation of political power. Unfortunately the will of the Scottish under-65s (who voted in favour of independence) was defeated by the mass no vote of the over-65s (73% of Scottish pensioners voted against independence).
Project Fear worked a treat. By scaring Scottish pensioners into thinking that they would lose their pensions in an independent Scotland, the Westminster establishment persuaded them to crap all over the dreams of a better Scotland that the younger generations believed in. Blair McDougal (the guy who ran "Better Together") admitted after the vote that they probably wouldn't have won without their fearmongering tactics.
Even though the result was a disappointment, the independence campaign was not a waste of time. The demographics show that the appetite for independence will only grow stronger as the older, more fearful generations die off. The pro-independence movement has resulted in the reinvigoration of Scottish politics with the pro-independence SNP and Scottish Green Party attracting unprecidented surges in new membership. Perhaps the most interesting consequence of all is the continuation of the slow suicide of the Scottish Labour Party, who have now appointed the horrible Westminster Blairite Jim Murphy to lead the party (into an electoral bloodbath in 2015). It's not like Labour weren't warned that sharing a platform with the politically toxic Tory Party would completely trash their reputation in Scotland. When it came to party conference season the right-wing press absolutely savaged the Labour leader Ed Miliband for forgetting to mention the deficit during conference speech, which he delivered without notes. A few days later David Cameron received widespread praise for his scripted conference speech, despite the fact that it included an outright lie about the national debt, one for which he has already been rebuked for by the UK Statistics Authority. It's bad enough that Cameron lied to the public that the Tories have been "paying down" the national debt, when they'd actually increased it by well over half a trillion pounds already, but to repeat the "paying down Britain's debts" lie again after having already been rebuked for it just goes to show the utter contempt David Cameron has for the public, and for anyone who might try to hold him to account for his lies. That Miliband was savaged for forgetting to mention the national debt, yet Cameron was lauded despite telling outright undeniable lies about it, just goes to show how ludicrously biased the mainstream press have become. In October 2014 the Home Secretary Theresa May announced further draconian powers designed to revoke freedom of speech from people who have have been found guilty of absolutely no crime whatever. She used the same old tactic of invoking scary Islamist bogeymen to distract attention away from her extremist agenda of abolishing freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, the presumption of innocence in order to further empower the surveillance state to interfere in the lives of people who have committed no crimes whatever.
Within days of UKIP winning their first seat in Westminster the mainstream press rushed to announce their decision to invite Nigel Farage to the pre-election leaders' debates. This prompted a lot of complaints from supporters of the Green Party, the SNP and Plaid Cymru, all of which had MPs in parliament long before UKIP won a couple of by-elections with their Tory Party defectors. The justification for this mad rush to invite UKIP from Sky, the BBC Channel 4 and ITV looked an awful lot like some kind of warped post hoc justification story rather than anything resembling the result of a coherently conducted and impartial analysis.
On the 20th of November 2014 a tiny minority of MPs turned up for a debate on monetary policy. In my view this was one of the most important debates in decades, and it's astonishing that so few MPs bothered to take an interest. Credit has to be given to the four MPs who brought the debate before parliament (Steve Baker, Micheal Meacher, Caroline Lucas and Doughlas Carswell) and to Positive Money, who have campaigned tirelessly to raise awareness of the hopelessly flawed monetary system, which allows private banks to create money out of nothing in order to inflate huge speculative bubbles in the housing market and the shadow banking sector. Here is a link to a video of the debate, and here is a link to the Hansard transcript. Back in December 2013 Iain Duncan Smith and the Tories laughed and smirked their way through a parliamentary debate on food poverty. In 2014 Iain Duncan Smith gave us another display of his utter contempt for the victims of his welfare "reforms" as he belly laughed and chortled his way through a debate on the hated "Bedroom Tax". Let's hope that the Tories are voted out of power in May 2015, meaning that we don't have to suffer yet another repeat performance of Iain Duncan Smith callously laughing at the plight of his victims come December 2015.
The AAV awards
Hero of the year - Steven Sutton
Steven Sutton died as a result of bowel cancer at the age of 19. Before he died he established a Just Giving fundraising campaign which raised over £4.5 million for the Teenage Cancer Trust. The young lad was a real hero and his story should be an inspiration to anyone who really wants to make the world a better place. Shortly before he died Steven said "I don't see the point in measuring life in terms of time any more. I'd rather measure life in terms of making a difference". In his 19 years he made more of a positive difference than a great many of us will ever make in our whole lifetimes. Villain of the year (readers' selection) - Iain Duncan Smith
Iain Duncan Smith was by far the most common nomination as villain of the year when I asked on theAnother Angry Voice Facebook page. Quite a lot of people nominated the likes of Nick Clegg, Nigel Farage, George Osborne, Sajid Javid and Theresa May, however the only other compelling nomination to provide IDS with competition for villain of the year is David Cameron, who several people pointed out is the man who leads the Tory party and has seen fit to let Iain Duncan Smith continue his sociopathic abuse of those he considers to be below him.
Villain of the year - Iain Duncan Smith
Of all of the vile members of the most vindictive right-wing government in living memory, one man stands beneath them all as an alarmingly deranged sociopath. Iain Duncan Smith is an appalling specimen of all that is wrong about humanity. He is a delusional, dishonest, self-aggrandising, narcissistic, callous and contemptuous individual who repeatedly laughs in the face of those who suffer under his draconian regime.
It is a sad fact that hateful misanthropes like Iain Duncan Smith will always exist in society, but the truly damning thing is that the Tory Party consider this delusional and incompetent sociopath an appropriate person to rule with an iron fist over the lives many of the most vulnerable people in society. Let's not forget that back in 2003 the Tory Party saw sense enough to remove him as their leader, so they clearly had the self-preservation instinct to know that Iain Duncan Smith is too dangerous and incompetent to run their own political party, but their contempt for the "lower orders" is such that they'd let this incompetent misanthrope abuse the most vulnerable people in society for over four years. Politician of the year (reader's selection) - Caroline Lucas By far the most common response for hero of the year when I asked on the Another Angry Voice Facebook page was the Green MP Caroline Lucas. Other politicians who received a lot of positive mentions included Michael Meacher, John McDonnell & Dennis Skinner (Labour), Patrick Harvie (Scottish Green), Alex Salmond & Nicola Sturgeon (SNP) and Leanne Wood (Plaid Cymru).
Politician of the year - Pablo Iglesias If I had limited myself to UK politics I would have had to have picked Caroline Lucas again, but since I decided to include international politicians too, I've gone for Pablo Iglesias, who is the leader of the Spanish left-wing anti-corruption party Podemos. The rise of Podemos has been absolutely phenomenal. The party was founded in March 2014, in May 2014 they took 8% of the vote and won 5 MEPs in the European elections and by November 2014 they had become the most popular political party in Spain. If there was an election in early 2015, Podemos would almost certainly form the new government, barring a coalition between the two main establishment parties (PP and PSOE) designed to protect the establishment class by keeping Podemos out of power (think of Labour and the Tories having to form a coalition to keep a newly formed left-wing political party out of power!).
The phenomenal rise of Podemos, under the leadership of Pablo Iglesias, should be an inspiration to progressive people all over the world. Best media of the year - Private Eye Last year I gave a joint award in this category to Private Eye and the Guardian. This year I'm giving it to Private Eye in their own right. If you don't know why I value Private Eye's contribution to journalism so highly, just buy a copy of the magazine. If the rest of the press tried to hold our politicians to account as well as Private Eye do, the UK surely wouldn't be such a corruption riddled and grotesquely unequal society led by self-serving sociopaths.
Worst media of the year - The BBC I know this selection will raise more than a few eyebrows considering some of the absolutely appalling drivel that has been written in the pages of the Daily Mail, Express and S*n this year, but nobody expects anything more from the right-wing hacks who write for those disgusting tabloid rags.
The BBC has long since tarnished it's reputation for impartiality, the death blow being the castration of the BBC by New Labour for (accurately) reporting the "sexed up" Iraq dossier in 2003. In recent years the pro-government bias at the BBC has become ever more apparent, with many BBC News reports these days being little more than barely recycled Tory party press releases. The scaremongering and ludicrously biased BBC coverage of the Scottish independence debate was awful, and the Daily Politics 5 vs 0 "debate" on social media was just laughable. As much as I appreciate the TV shows with no adverts, the long history of producing high quality comedy and drama and the pioneering work of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the BBC has now become an abomination which tries to hide it's establishment bias behind a fake veneer of impartiality. The problem with the BBC is not that it is as bad as the Daily Mail and the Murdoch empire, it's that we should expect so much more from it.
Resignation of the year - Alex Salmond The most high profile resignation of the year in UK politics was that of the SNP leader and Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond after Scotland narrowly rejected independence. After all, he was the only political leader in UK politics with a majority government.
Even though he's resigned, he's clearly not planning on fading away into obscurity, and we'll certainly be hearing a lot more from him if he wins a seat in Westminster in 2015.
U-turn of the year - Liberal Democrats ("Bedroom Tax") Since sneaking into power in 2010 the Lib-Dems have U-turned so much that you could coat them in copper, surround them with magnets and generate enough electricity to power a small town. The most bizarre of their double U-turns was their decision in July 2014 to begin arguing against the "Bedroom Tax" (legislation that only exists because they voted it into existence), before siding with the Tories in December to defeat a Labour Party motion to repeal the "Bedroom Tax"!
This kind of jaw-dropping hypocrisy from the Liberal Democrats is a toxic legacy from which the party will probably/hopefully never recover.
Best campaign of the year - Save the New Era Estate
Worst campaign of the year - Greenpeace vandalism of the Nazca lines
There have been lots of campaigns for bad things that I strongly disagree with, but Greenpeace really shot themselves in the foot by pissing off almost everybody with their desecration of the Nazca Lines in Peru. It's not because I dislike them that Greenpeace get my worst campaign award, it's because it takes a ridiculously stupid move to severely piss off people who actually agree with what you're campaigning in favour of. How on earth anyone in Greenpeace thought it would be a good idea to vandalise one of the World's most fragile and amazing pieces of cultural heritage is completely beyond me. Who signed off on the plan? And why didn't any of the activists who were involved think that archaeological vandalism might not be the best way to raise awareness of renewable energy?
Excuse of the year - the causes of racism according to UKIP
The LBC presenter James O'Brien managed to pull off two incredible UKIP interviews of 2014. In one he repeatedly harangued a UKIP supporter for apparently not knowing a single UKIP policy and in another (commonly described as Farage's "car crash" interview) he discombobulated Nigel Farage so badly that he ended up making racist comments about Romanians. Farage's excuse was that "I was, sort of, completely tired out". This strikes me as an odd excuse, because I've suffered insomnia for much of my life, and the resultant tiredness has never made me say racist things about Romanians, or any other races, nationalities, colours or creeds for that matter.
The "tiredness causes bigotry" excuse was bizarre enough, but in December 2014 the UKIP candidate Kerry Smith tried to defend describing a Chinese woman as a "chinky bird" and homosexuals as "disgusting old poofters" as being a result of his medication for back pain. I'm pretty sure that most of us have used some powerful painkillers at some point in our lives without turning into hateful bigots as a side effect.
Perhaps the most offensive thing Kerry Smith said was his "joke" about going on a "peasant hunt" to shoot people from Chigwell. It just goes to show how flexible the UKIP principles are that they would seek to make political capital out of a Labour MP tweeting a picture of a house, yet when one of their own is infinitely more insulting about "the lower orders" they can't wait to roll out the excuses for his blatant bigotry.
Best Blog - Scriptonite Daily Last year I gave this award to Johnny Void (who continues to do great work). This year I've selected Scriptonite Daily. Kerry Ann Mendoza has had an inspirational year, appearing regularly on the television and demonstrating how independent journalists can use non-traditional financing methods to fund their work. A great example of this was her crowdfunded trip to Gaza to report on the Israeli bombardment in July 2014. One of the things I really like about her work is the way that she meticulously backs up so many of her assertions with sources, which is something that I try to do in my own work too. Book of the year - Harry's Last Stand Of course this award is limited to the small set of new books I found the time to read in 2014. I've chosen "Harry's Last Stand" by Harry Leslie Smith because it's a masterful piece of writing and an impassioned plea from someone who experienced terrible conditions in the 1930s for the people of Britain to stand up and defend the progress of the post-war years, and to prevent the Tories from dragging us back to the 1930s with their ideological austerity agenda. Seven of the best
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