Who is the most incompetent Tory government minister?

The modern Conservative Party is a microcosm of all that's gone so wrong in modern Britain. The vast majority of the top positions have been gobbled up by wealthy, over-entitled elitists with establishment connections, and there's practically no social mobility within the party to provide competition to replace people who are manifestly incompetent, so there's basically no getting rid of the people who created the appalling situation we're in.

Background

David Cameron bears a lot of responsibility for the state of things given his extraordinarily lax attitude towards the incompetence of his ministers:

• George Osborne's austerity agenda completely failed to eliminate the deficit by 2015 as he promised it would (current Tory deficit elimination projection 2031, or 21 years to do what they said they'd achieve in under 5). 

• Theresa May cocked up one piece of legislation after another, introduced the horrific "hostile environment" policies that created the Windrush scandal, and failed her (ridiculous and arbitrary) promise to cut net migration to below 100,000 so badly that net migration reached an all time high. 

• And even the legendarily incompetent Iain Duncan Smith was allowed to continue maliciously and incompetently wrecking the lives of sick, disabled, and jobless people until he resigned just before the Brexit vote in order to damage Cameron as much as possible.

Since Theresa May took over the lax Tory attitude towards incompetence is even worse, especially since May threw away her majority in 2017 and left herself relying on the sectarian DUP bigots to cling to power. Even if she had the will to discipline errant and incompetent MPs, she's definitely not got the authority.

Take Boris Johnson's continual array of gaffes and errors as Foreign Secretary that even led to a jailed British citizen in Iran having their sentence increased. Take Gavin Williamson's utterly pathetic "Russia should go away and shut up" comment that made Britain look a laughing stock for having such a jumped up little squit as their Defence Secretary. And take the way the DWP minister Esther McVey has been allowed to totally get away with barefaced lying to the House of Commons with no punishment.

The contenders

Karen Bradley

Karen Bradley was appointed Northern Ireland Secretary in January 2018. She was always an odd choice for the job given the difficulties involved: Brexit and the Irish border question, the absolute deadlock in the Northern Irish devolved parliament, the massive increase in sectarianism, and the very real risk to the peace process caused by the DUP propping up the UK government while the territory is effectively under indefinite "home rule".

Given the seriousness of the circumstances one would have expected an experienced heavy-hitter to take on the role, but instead Theresa May passed it off to the shockingly lightweight but pliable and subservient Karen Bradley.

In September 2018 Bradley made the shocking admission that she didn't even know that Northern Irish politics is divided on sectarian lines. That's the kind of absolute basic that anyone who pays the remotest attention to Northern Irish news understands, not the kind of thing the actual government minister for Northern Ireland was completely ignorant of.

Chris Grayling

When Theresa May became Prime Minister her decision to appoint Chris Grayling as her Transport Minister was a signal of the absolute contempt she has towards public transport users, because his woeful track record in other departments has earned him the nickname "failing Grayling".

As minister for Employment in Cameron's government he introduced unlawful tribunal fees to deter workers from seeking recompense when sacked by bad bosses. The messes he made in the Ministry of Justice were even worse, with his spectacularly botched privatisation of the Probation Service still creating headaches for his successors to this day.

At Transport "failing Grayling" has truly excelled himself, presiding over two simultaneous farces with Southern Rail and Northern Rail services in chaos, meanwhile he ended up having to return the flagship East Coast Mainline to public ownership for a third time as yet another private operator ran away rather than face making losses on the contract they signed.

When it comes to the ever increasing threat of a chaotic "no deal" Tory Brexit Britain faces huge challenges when it comes to issues like aviation, shipping, licencing issues for hauliers, and the infrastructure for customs checks at UK borders. You really couldn't think of a worse person to deal with all these complexities than a serial failure like Chris Grayling.

Liam Fox

Shortly after Theresa May appointed the disgraced Liam Fox as her International Trade minister he bragged that securing a trade deal with the EU would be "the easiest in human history".

Fast forward two years and Fox is claiming that there's now a 60-40 chance of the UK crashing out of the EU with no deal at all, and attempting to cast blame onto the EU negotiating team for his shocking complacency, and his abject failure to get to grips with his brief.

Theresa May

Theresa May's 2017 vanity election will surely go down in history as an examplar of political hubris. She had the comfort of a reasonable majority until 2020, but she somehow decided to gamble it in the hope of achieving a landslide election victory and a super-majority so that she could conduct Brexit as an unstoppable hard-right autocrat.

Amazingly Theresa May learned nothing from David Cameron's spectacularly misjudged Brexit gamble that was only intended to win a few votes off UKIP at the 2015 General Election, not throw the entire nation into years of turmoil.

Having learned nothing about the inherent risks of political gambling from the demise of her predecessor she threw away her parliamentary majority with another ridiculously ill-judged gamble of her own.

But aside from her ridiculous vanity election there's another telling issue. There's the fact that she is personally responsible for the appointment of all three of the other candidates in this list.

Conclusion

There are strong cases to be made for all four of the candidates for most incompetent Tory minister, but since one of them is directly responsible for the appointment of the other three, so she's surely got to be the leading candidate.

Anyhow, feel free to vote in my Twitter poll on which one of them is the worst of all.

 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.

OR

Jeremy Corbyn should demand an apology from Chris Grayling over his defamatory comments

On the BBC Radio 4 Today programme the Tory government minister Chris Grayling told an absolute whopper of a lie about Jeremy Corbyn. Unsurprisingly the Today programme presenters didn't think to call Grayling out on his lie, they just left it there, further rotting away the BBC's own shockingly degraded reputation, as well as his.

The lie Grayling resorted to was a claim that "Jeremy Corbyn attended the funeral of terrorists" in Tunisia.

Here are the actual facts:

• At the invitation of the Tunisian Prime Minister in 2014, Jeremy Corbyn attended a remembrance ceremony for the victims of an Israeli terrorist atrocity (the 1985 bombing of the Palestinian government in exile in Tunis that was even condemned by Margaret Thatcher at the time).

• The event was not a "funeral" in any way shape or form because nobody was buried there on the day Corbyn visited.

• None of the eight terrorists who carried out the Munich attack are even buried in Tunisia, let alone in the graveyard Jeremy Corbyn visited (five are buried in Libya, two in unknown graves after being assassinated by the Israelis, and one was last seen in hiding in 1999).

• There is no evidence that the Black September members who were buried in the graveyard in 1992 were "terrorists" or Munich "plotters" as alleged in the shockingly dishonest Daily Mail front page that kicked off this latest anti-Corbyn smear campaign. 

• If Israel did have any evidence whatever of their involvement in the Munich plot, then perhaps they should have arrested them and put them on trial, rather than carrying out an extrajudicial assassination?

In light of these basic facts, Grayling's accusation that "Jeremy Corbyn attended the funeral of terrorists" is clearly highly inaccurate and defamatory.
Even by the utterly debased standards of British political discourse, you can't just accuse people of attending the funeral of terrorists with no factual justification whatever.

And even considering Grayling's stupidity, you would have thought that he would have learned the lesson that baselessly slandering your political opponents is an unwise move after Ben Bradley's mega-viral apology Tweet over the Czech spy nonsense (still the most viral Tory Tweet of 2018 by far!).

In my view Jeremy Corbyn should instruct his lawyers to offer Chris Grayling the chance to avoid legal action by making a public apology for his defamatory statement (perhaps in the form of a Ben Bradley type "please retweet" apology from an official Tory party account) and a significant donation to a Israeli-Palestinian peace organisation.

 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.

OR

We're being ruled over by a bunch of self-serving Tory cowards

It probably hasn't escaped your notice that Britain is facing its biggest and riskiest diplomatic challenge in decades in Brexit, as well as a catastrophic NHS crisis, and the ruinous economic legacies of almost eight years of toxic Tory austerity dogma and wage repression policies.

At such a crucial juncture it's incredibly vital that we have political leaders with the honesty to explain the seriousness of the situations we face, and the bravery to stand up to the challenge.

Unfortunately we have exactly the opposite. We're governed by a deceitful bunch of cowards.

The National Health Service has collapsed into its worst winter crisis in decades, with NHS England cancelling outpatient appointments and day case surgery, and deploying consultants to make up staff shortfalls in A&E units.

As this NHS meltdown is unfolding the Tory health secretary Jeremy Hunt is in hiding.

This latest display of cowardice from Hunt is hardly unusual. In May 2017 he hid from the public during the massive WannaCry cyber attack on the NHS, and he's spent the last two months pathetically hiding from the actor Ralf Little who challenged him to a public debate on the NHS back in early November.

Then there's the Tory transport minister Chris Grayling who is hiding in Qatar to avoid scrutiny of the astounding mess he's making of his brief (his successors are still desperately trying to clear up all the messes he created during his time as David Cameron's Justice Minister long after he was moved on in 2015).

UK rail commuters have experienced yet another fare hike of 3.4%, meaning that season ticket prices have increased by 50% since the Tories came to power in 2010, and against a backdrop of collapsing real terms wages too.

Then there's the astounding £2 billion bailout Grayling has handed to the Virgin/Stagecoach East Coast Franchise, allowing them to quit years early without paying what they owe the taxpayer under the terms of the contract they signed up to.

The recently departed chair of Theresa May's National Infrastructure Commission Andrew Adonis has called on Grayling to quit over his grubby deal with Virgin/Stagecoach, and challenged him to a public debate over the absolute mess he's making.

Grayling is hiding in Qatar.

This cowardice problem is clearly endemic within the Tory party, and it's pretty damned easy to see where it's stemming from.

During the 2017 general election Theresa May outright refused to debate Jeremy Corbyn, or any of her other political opponents. Her cowardice was so extreme that she even sent her recently bereaved subordinate Amber Rudd into a live debate to act as a human bullet shield for her.

It's no surprise at all that senior Tories think that they can get away with such brazen displays of cowardice, because they're simply following the example set by their own party leader.

Then there's the fact that Theresa May is even still in her job despite slinging away the Tory parliamentary majority with an astounding act of hubris and one of the worst general election campaigns in British political history.

The Tories know that she's a lame duck Prime Minister who is being forced to dance to the tune of the many of the most extreme influences in British politics (the headbanger Europhobes on the Tory hard-right; the DUP bigots she had to bribe into backing her government; right-wing propaganda barons like Rupert Murdoch and Paul Dacre; and the ever-so-fickle blue-kipper demographic who she's rendered herself completely dependent upon).

The entire Tory party knows that Theresa May is a weak and directionless leader with no room for manoeuvre, and that it's clearly against the national interest to go into the Brexit trade negotiations with such a spineless and compromised leader, but they have their own self-interest to think of.

They know that forcing Theresa May out as leader would massively increase the likelihood of another election, and of Jeremy Corbyn storming to victory with scores of Tory MPs losing their seats.

So the Tory cowards would rather keep their lame duck leader in power to the obvious detriment of the national interest, just so that they can keep their ministerial cars and salaries, and avoid the loss of dozens of Tory seats.

The question shouldn't really be why the Tories are such bunch of cowards, but why so many millions of British people are content to be ruled over by such a spineless, self-serving rabble.

 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.

OR

The secretive Tory "party within a party" drawing up insane policies and promoting Brextremism

Most people are aware that ever since Theresa May threw away her parliamentary majority in her vanity election, she's been at the beck and call of the extreme-right Europhobic fringe of the Tory party because she has no room to manoeuvre without continually appeasing them.

What is less commonly known is the fact that this hard-right fringe of the Tory party have clubbed together to form a shady and highly secretive "party within a party" which uses taxpayers' cash to bankroll their push for an extreme and highly destructive hard-right version of Brexit.

This group of Brextremist Tory politicians call themselves the European Research Group, and between them members have claimed over £250,000 in parliamentary expenses for work they claim to have done on behalf of this fringe pressure group. 

The Tory MPs who have claimed taxpayer cash for work done on behalf of their secretive Brextremism operation include Michael Gove, Andrea Leadsom, Sajid Javid, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Chris Grayling, David Gauke, Penny Mordaunt, and Liam Fox.

It's estimated that the ERG has around 80 members but nobody knows for sure. Numerous efforts have been made to establish which specific Tory MPs are members of this secretive hard-right Brexit pressure group, but they continually refuse to provide details of their membership or activities, despite the significant amount of taxpayers' cash that has been claimed on behalf of the group.

It's been reported that the group run their own whipping operation within the Tory party to ensure that the members of the group continually push for the hardest and most anti-democratic interpretation of the Brexit referendum vote.

They also have a secret WhatsApp group they use to coordinate their activities, and hold regular meetings at which government ministers have been know to assure the group that Theresa May is complying with their Brextremist demands.

Here is a list of known members of the group (politicians with positions within Theresa May's government in bold):

• Suella Fernandes (the current chairperson of the group & PPS at the Treasury))
• Steve Baker (previous chairperson of the group until promoted into the Brexit department)
• Liam Fox (Minister for International Trade)
• Craig Mackinlay (Former UKIP politician who defected to the Tories)
• Andrea Leadsom (former Tory leadership candidate, Leader of the Commons)
• Sajid Javid (Minister for communities and local government)
• Chris Heaton-Harris (The Tory whip who sent McCarthyite inquisition letters to UK universities)
• Jacob Rees-Mogg (regularly touted as a future Tory leader)
• Chris Grayling (Minister for Transport)
• Michael Tomlinson (low profile Tory MP and deputy chair of the group)
• Michael Gove (Minister for the Environment)
• Penny Mordaunt (Minister for International Development)
• David Guake (Minister for Work and Pensions)

As can be seen from this list, Theresa May's government is absolutely riddled with members of this Brextremist pressure group.

Just to get an idea of the extremist nonsense this group is using taxpayer funds to come up with, just consider the new report drawn up by the former-Ukipper turned Tory Craig Mackinlay, which calls for the introduction of visas for all EU visitors to the UK.

Mackinlay claims that such a move would raise £150 million by charging everyone who visits the UK from the EU, but it's spectacularly easy to spot the flaws in this plan.

The first major flaw is that the £150 million "profit" does not take account of the lost tax revenues caused by driving away potential visitors with time consuming and costly visa applications. It would only need a small percentage drop in tourism from the continent to massively reduce tax revenues and eclipse the £150 million "profit" leaving country significantly worse off.

Aside from the obvious false economics of the scheme there's also the fact that such a move from Britain would obviously trigger a reciprocal response, with the EU requiring visas for British visitors to any of the EU member states. This would create the situation where EU citizens would have the choice of visa free travel anywhere within the EU, or the time and expense of applying for a visa to visit the UK. Meanwhile British citizens would have to apply for visas to visit all ten of our top ten travel destinations (which are in order: Spain, France, Italy, Ireland, USA Portugal, Germany, Netherlands, Greece, Poland).

It's bad enough that this fanatical group of Tory MPs has appointed a rabid former-Ukipper to come up with an absurd plan to kick the UK tourism industry to pieces, significantly reduce UK tax revenues in order to raise a paltry £150 million by rinsing cash out of any EU citizens who still chose to visit Brexit Britain, and trigger a reciprocal tit-for-tat response from the EU that would significantly impact millions of British visitors to the continent.

But the fact is that they're actually claiming huge wodges of taxpayers' cash to promote this kind of hard-right Brextremism is the most extraordinary thing about it.

Then there's the fact that members of this secretive Brextremist group are embedded throughout Theresa May's government, with leading members of the ERG claiming that they have the power to "get anything they want" from Theresa May.

 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.

OR

Why Brexiters should pick fruit and veg

The National Farmers Union (the only right-wing pro-Tory union) has joined the chorus of complaints about the fact that the Brexit vote has chased away thousands of seasonal migrant workers, and left food rotting in the fields across Britian.

Hundreds of tons of Apples in Worcestershire, blueberries in Scotland, raspberries in Kent and various other crops like broccoli, cauliflower and pumpkins have been left to rot because there's simply not enough workers to pick them after the Brexit vote.

The NFU's monthly Land Labour Survey found a 29% labour shortage in September, up from 17% in 2016, which raises the question of how much worse these labour shortages will get after Brexit goes ahead, especially if the hard-right Tory fringe get the ruinous "no deal" cliff edge Brexit they're pining for.

These agricultural labour shortages also raise the question of how the Tory transport minister Chris Grayling thinks the solution to post-Brexit import tariffs should be for UK farmers to just "grow more food", when Brexit and the subsequent collapse in the value of the pound is already causing huge agricultural labour shortages, and massive financial losses as perfectly good food is left to rot in the fields.

One potential solution to the crisis of food rotting in fields is for the people who actually voted in favour of the absolute madness of allowing a bunch of inept and disgustingly self-serving Tories to pursue a shambolic "make it up as we go along" Brexit to get off their lazy arses and go and pick the fruit and veg themselves before it all goes rotten.

It's hardly surprising that Brexiters (and British people in general) don't want to do the poorly-paid backbreaking physical labour that seasonal migrant workers do. It's bloody hard work, and it's really poorly paid.

Of course Brexiters in particular would object to doing backbreaking physical labour for the minimum wage, because they're the kind of people who wanted to "take back control" and "get our country back" just by making a mark on a piece of paper, then going home and letting someone else do all the actual work.

What is surprising is that so many Brexiters failed to realise that the wealth and prosperity that they enjoy (which includes the abundance of fresh fruit and vegetables on our supermarket shelves) is the result of the labour of the working poor, including an awful lot of poorly paid seasonal migrant workers.

Now it's obvious that not all Brexiters were motivated by xenophobia, but plenty enough of them were to swing the referendum in favour of Brexit. A post referendum ICM poll found that 23% of Brexit voters supported the proposition that EU citizens in the UK, and UK citizens in the EU should be forcibly repatriated to their countries of origin.

Extrapolate that result and some 4 million of the 17.4 million Brexit voters actually want the fields cleared of all EU seasonal migrant workers, as well as a mass purge of EU workers from our universities, NHS, emergency services, high-tech industries, and all other sectors of the economy. And in return they want the forced repatriation of some 300,000 UK pensioners from Spain, as well as another 900,000 British people who have used their EU right to free movement to make their lives overseas, and who might just be somewhat peeved at being forced to return to Blighty.

Of course something as insane as this is unlikely to happen, no matter how much this extreme but significant minority of Brexiters pine for it, because ethnic cleansing, nationalist discrimination and forced repatriation are the kinds of overtly fascist policies that most of Europe left behind in the 20th Century with the adoption of the European Convention on Human Rights (liberal British values bestowed on post-war Europe by the determination of Clement Attlee of the Labour Party and Winston Churchill of the Tories).

The sad truth is that the significant minority of extremist Brexit voters didn't just want this agricultural crisis to be happening, they actually want it to be much worse, with all EU workers expelled, and even more perfectly good food left rotting in the fields.

And what is worse is that these people who have inflicted this damage on the UK agricultural sector because of their xenophobic whims won't even volunteer to do the work that needs doing now that they're becoming aware of the problem they've created. They'll just sit idly by and expect others to clear up their mess.

So if you're one of the significant minority of Brexiters who voted the way you did because you wanted the foreigners expelled, go and pick the fruit and veg before it rots in the fields.

It doesn't matter if you're retired, picking fruit and veg slowly and inefficiently is better than leaving it to rot. 

And it doesn't matter if you already have a job. Fruit and veg picked at weekends and on Bank Holidays is better than produce left to spoil because there's nobody to pick it at all.

And if you're one of the Brexiters who voted without really thinking about the consequences of your actions for the agricultural sector, maybe you should lend a hand too, because it's highly unlikely that the four million odd seething xenophobes you sided with are going to take any responsibility for their actions at all isn't it?

 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.

OR

We could "grow more food" but who is going to do the work?

The Tory transport minister Chris Grayling has come up with a fantastic solution to the "no deal" Brexit chaos the Tories are actively planning to inflict on the UK economy.

A "no deal" Tory Brexit would mean import and export tariffs on a huge range of items, including food products. This wouldn't just mean taxes on food imported from the EU, it would mean taxes on food from all of the countries the EU has negotiated trade deals with too. This is because the UK would not just be crashing out of the Single Market in a "no deal" scenario, the country would also be crashing out of every trade deal the UK has joined through the EU over the last four decades.

The UK imports almost 45% of the food we eat. Nearly 80% of these food imports come from EU states, and the vast majority of the rest comes from countries that Britain has trade deals with that have been negotiated through the EU.

Chris Grayling's glib and simplistic solution to the problem of import tariffs on food products is "we'll grow more food here".

Aside from the fact that it's impossible to grow a lot of products in the British climate that British consumers now take for granted on their supermarket shelves, and the fact that it would cost £billions in investment in stuff like greenhouses, machinery, polytunnels, etc to increase the productivity of the UK agricultural industry so dramatically, there's also the glaring question of who is going to do the work?

Brexit hasn't even happened yet, but 2017 saw a 20% shortfall in seasonal migrant agricultural labour. Once a ruinous Tory "no deal" Brexit is launched, the shortfall is certain to grow dramatically, as migrant workers from the EU would lose their right to free movement, and end up facing a bureaucratic nightmare as the massively over-stretched Tory government try to cobble together a new set of immigration rules overnight.

In order to massively increase domestic agriculture output at the same time as the agricultural sector is suffering a massive labour shortfall because Brexit is chasing away a huge percentage of seasonal migrant workers, someone else would obviously have to do the work.

So where are the Tories going to find the labour supply to do all of this agricultural work?

Here are a few ideas based on previous Tory policies and proposals by Tory MPs:

One obvious source of agricultural workers would be to force jobless people to go out picking fruit and vegetables in return for no wages (instead of retraining or searching for actual paid employment). The Tories have demonstrated time and again that they believe that the state has the right to confiscate the labour of the individual through their use of numerous exploitative and economically damaging "Workfare" forced labour schemes.

Another solution would be to run with the Tory MP Philip Davies' proposal that disabled people don't deserve to be paid the minimum wage. Of course a workforce of severely sick and disabled people on wages of just a few quid an hour is hardly likely to be the most efficient workforce in the world, what with their physical limitations, their reluctance to work hard for below minimum wage pay, and their increased likelihood of falling ill or dying on the job, but there are millions of sick and disabled people for whom the Tory government have displayed absolute contempt (with their arbitrary disability welfare cuts, their cuts to statutory sick pay, their confiscation of mobility vehicles, their deliberated discrimination against people with mental health conditions, and their dehumanising disability denial factories). Who cares if sick and disabled people would make an inefficient workforce who keep dying on the job? It's not hard to imagine certain Tory ministers seeing the appalling death toll as a cost benefit because more dead disabled people would mean fewer mouths to feed on Brexit Britain's dramatically diminished food supplies.

Another solution would be work with the proposal made by the unelected peer Michael Bichard that pensioners should be forced to work for their pensions in order to avoid being "a negative burden on society". Of course herding elderly people into the fields to do back-breaking agricultural work would have the same problems of inefficiency and a very high labour force death rate, but there would be some element of poetic justice given that the economic chaos of a "no deal" Tory Brexit would have been enabled by millions of pensioners flocking to the polling stations to give the hard-right fringe of the Tory party the green light to just make Brexit up as they go along.

You wouldn't put it beyond the most cruel and compassionless Tories like Iain Duncan Smith, Chris Grayling, Philip Davies and Priti Patel to force sick, disabled, and elderly people to do backbreaking agricultural labour for little pay, or no wages at all, but in all seriousness, the most likely supply of agricultural labour will come from the wave of unemployment triggered by the "no deal" Brexit meltdown.

"No deal" would mean chaos and mass redundancies in a wide range of industries, especially in the manufacturing, tourism, aviation, the financial sector, and the export/import industries. And without the right to freedom of movement, looking for jobs in the same industries elsewhere in Europe would be out of the question. So Chris Grayling's "no deal" Brexit dream is for Britain do downgrade and deskill down to a more rudimentary agrarian economy, with former pilots, travel agents, production line managers, financial analysts, logistics experts, and the like sent out into the fields to pick cauliflowers for crap pay so that the country doesn't starve.

Still, Brexiteer Tory politicians and the mercenary hacks shilling for hard-right billionaire propaganda barons like Jonathan Harmsworth, Richard Desmond, the Barclay brothers and Rupert Murdoch will still keep pushing as hard as they can for their fantasy of a nuclear "no deal" Brexit, because there's no way they're going to be the ones who are going to end up living in huts in the back end of nowhere and doing backbreaking cabbage-picking work for the glory of Brexit Britain is there? 

 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.

OR

12 reasons Chris Grayling was an absolutely dreadful Justice Secretary

The fact that a serial failure like Chris Grayling still has an important cabinet position is indicative of the absolute dearth of talent in the Tory party.

Grayling started off as one of Iain Duncan Smith's henchmen at the DWP, the then spent three years as the worst Secretary of State for Justice imaginable.

Despite his almost unbreakable tolerance for abject incompetence from his ministers* David Cameron finally saw sense in 2015 and moved Grayling into largely ceremonial roles where he had little ability to wreak havoc over ordinary people's lives.

After David Cameron's EU gamble backfired so spectacularly Theresa May gave Grayling a lifeline back into a position where he could cause more damage by making him Transport Secretary.

Since then he has bee pursuing policies like handing the Southwestern franchise to the Chinese government to operate (because Tory ideology prohibits the UK state from running UK transport networks, but is fine with the Chinese state running UK transport networks!), deciding to hand operation of the UK taxpayer funded HS2 line directly to foreign governments to profiteer from (France, China and Italy are the bidders), and sneakily cancelling several rail electrification upgrades in Wales and the north of England just days before parliament went off on summer break.

Here's a recap of 12 things that make Chris Grayling not only the worst Justice Secretary ever, but possibly even the worst government minister in David Cameron's dreadful coalition of failure with the Lib-Dems.

Unqualified

Since 2007 the role of Secretary of State for Justice has included the job of Lord Chancellor. Before David Cameron appointed Chris Grayling to the position, every single Lord Chancellor for centuries had been a qualified legal professional. 

Grayling was the first head of the legal system to have no legal qualifications whatever, and this Tory anti-expertise trend has continued after his departure in 2015.

Grayling's successor Michael Gove was the 2nd unqualified Lord Chancellor in modern history, Gove's successor Liz Truss was the 3rd, and her successor David Liddington is the 4th legally unqualified Lord Chancellor in succession.

Unlawful Tribunal fees

It's taken four years and an epic battle all the way up to the Supreme Court to get Chris Grayling's discriminatory anti-worker employment tribunal fees declared unlawful (thanks to Unison for fighting to protect workers' rights).

Despite their claims to the contrary this legislation was always intended as a bad bosses' charter to give terrible employers the freedom to abuse their low-income workers and sack them at will, safe in the knowledge they wouldn't be able to afford the employment tribunal fees.

Not only did these fees act as a deliberate Tory barrier to the justice system for low-income workers, they also demonstrably discriminated against women. It's telling that instead of quitly backtracking on this depraved policy of pricing people out of seeking justice Theresa May carried on fighting tooth and nail to keep these sexist Tory rules in place long after Grayling was gone.

Probation service privatisation

Chris Grayling's ideologically driven privatisation of the probation service was criticised at the time as a reckless gamble, and the resulting chaos is probably even worse than predicted.

Grayling decided that the taxpayer should keep responsibility for probation services for long-term prisoners while probation services for prisoners sentenced to a year or less were carved up and distributed to 21 different private outsourcing companies.

A 2016 report found that ex-prisoners are being failed and the public put at risk. Of the 86 released prisoners the research team investigated not a single one of them had any help in relation to training, education or employment. A third were released with nowhere to live, and one registered sex offender simply disappeared after release.

Legal aid cuts

Legal Aid is a fundamental part of the modern welfare system which prevents the justice system from being just a plaything of the rich by providing adequate legal representation to people from poor and ordinary backgrounds.

Grayling is a fanatical right-winger so he attacked legal aid funding with glee, stripping legal aid entitlement from all kinds of cases. The result was a predictable rise in the percentage of people attempting to represent themselves in court, meaning thousands upon thousands of wasted hours in court (especially family courts) as proceedings had to be abandoned due to procedural cockups from self-representing legal novices.

Aside from the costs and the wasted time, there's also the fact that unknown thousands have been denied justice altogether as they simply gave up on the idea of seeking legal redress for the injustices they've suffered for lack of legal representation.

Restrictions on legal aid for domestic violence victims

As part of Grayling's assault on legal aid he decided to slash women's entitlement to legal aid for domestic violence cases.

If a woman couldn't prove that they'd been subjected to domestic abuse with either medical evidence or legal records from the previous five years they wouldn't get legal aid. This attack on domestic violence victims was widely condemned at the time, and in February 2017 it was finally reversed when the government caved into the pressure to accept evidence from charities, solicitors and housing officers.

Tendering for legal aid contracts

Aside from cutting legal aid to the bone another of Chris Grayling's brainwaves was to introduce tendering for legal aid services, so that people needing legal aid would have no longer have freedom to chose their own lawyer (from a local company, or from a firm of legal specialists in the field required) and simply be handed one from a pre-approved government list.

This planned shakeup was designed to benefit big legal companies and drive small independent legal practices out of business. One of the big players in this get-what-you're given strategy was, believe it or not, the haulage company Eddie Stobart!

Thankfully Grayling's successor Michael Gove listened to the absolute chorus of condemnation from the legal profession and scrapped Grayling's madcap plans.

Selling prison advice to the Saudi tyrants

One of Grayling's most widely condemned schemes was the establishment of a shady commercial offshoot of the Justice Department called Justice Solutions International which won a £5.9 million contract to advise the brutal Islamist tyrants in Saudi Arabia how to run their prisons.

In October 2015 Jeremy Corbyn forced one of his first significant U-turns out of the Tory government by calling for the contract with the Saudi tyrants to be scrapped, which Grayling's successor Michael Gove eventually did due citing "human rights concerns".

Criminal court fees

In 2015 Chris Grayling introduced fees for defendants found guilty at a magistrates court to pay £150 and those convicted at crown court to hand over £1,200.

People complained that the fees were incentivising innocent people to plead guilty to crimes they didn't commit out of fear of being hit with Grayling's fees if they tried to plead their innocence.

Over 100 magistrates resigned over the charges. Grayling's successor Michael Gove scrapped the charges saying the "intent has fallen short".

Cutting legal aid for prisoners

Chris Grayling loved playing up to the hard-right press by devising policies to be tough on prisoners. One of these schemes was a 2013 ruling banning legal aid for prisoners.

In my view you don't have to be a tree-huggling liberal leftie to believe that a prisoner who has been denied any kind of education, offender behaviour programmes or training while locked up should have the right to seek legal intervention to ensure they do get the help they need to avoid re-offending in the future.

In 2017 Grayling's cuts to legal aid for prisoners were ruled unlawful and overturned.

Banning books

Another of Grayling's attacks on the prison population was his ruling banning them from receiving books. This one really hit the headlines because there's nothing quite as right-wing authoritarian as banning books.

In December 2014 a High Court ruling found that banning prisoners from receiving books was unlawful, and Grayling's successor Michael Gove sensibly decided not to bother appealing against the judgement and binned the policy.

Unlawful prison absconder policy

One of Grayling's most ridiculous blunders came when he decided to introduce a knee-jerk policy after the right-wing press whipped up a huge fuss when an armed robber called Michael "Skullcracker" Wheatley went on the run from day release.

Grayling's new policy was to rush through a ban on any prisoner who had absconded from serving in open prison. The problem was that this new policy glaringly contradicted a previous Grayling policy that inmates serving indeterminate sentences should go through a phased release from closed to open prisons "in order to test their readiness for release into the community".

In 2015 Grayling's knee-jerk prisoner absconder policy was declared unlawful at the High Court after a case was brought by a prisoner called John Gilbert who technically absconded from day release because he missed his last train, but handed himself into a police station first thing in the morning.

The judges said the inconsistency between Grayling’s new absconder policy and his long-standing directions to the parole board was "irrational", and they were also "not impressed" by Grayling's absurd claim that since the ban and the parole board directions had both been issued by him, he had the power to ignore or contradict either of them at will!

Making Michael Gove look good

Michael Gove is a Rupert Murdoch hack turned politician. As education secretary he vandalised the education system by privatising thousands of state schools into the hands of unaccountable private psuedo-charities (many operated by major Tory party donors). He also oversaw a proliferation of unqualified teachers into our classrooms and once famously claimed that all schools should attain above average status!

The fact that a bumbling right-wing fanatic like Michael Gove had to come in and clear up so many of Grayling's messes just goes to show how utterly crap he must have been.

Just imagine how ideologically extreme and incompetent a person would have to be in order to end up making a right-wing fruit loop like Michael Gove look level-headed and competent in comparison!

 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.

OR

* = Despite their serial incompetence Iain Duncan Smith, George Osborne and Theresa May were never sacked, but Grayling's monumental blunders at Ministry of Justice were so huge, and so regular that even David Cameron couldn't ignore them.