Remainers have come up with their stupidest idea yet

Just a few days ago I warned that it was only a matter of time before Remainers came up with an even stupider idea than cobbling together some kind of unelected "foil Brexit at any cost" coalition led by some Remain-fixated backbencher that virtually nobody has heard of, and allowing Boris sodding Johnson to colonise the moral high ground.

Within days my prediction has come true. They've done it again!

Painting yourselves as the avowed anti-democrats intent on foiling Brexit by any means and allowing Johnson to stroll onto the moral high ground would be extraordinary strategic ineptitude, but ex-Tory constituency squatter MP Heidi Allen has come up with an even stupider strategy: Let Boris Johnson and the Brextremists crash the UK out of the EU in a ruinous No Deal Brexit meltdown, then simply undo the damage later using retroactive legislation!

As an ex-Tory you can see why she thinks this is a solution, after all, she repeatedly voted in favour of using retroactive legislation to cover up their own criminality, from retroactive legislation to magically make Iain Duncan Smith's unlawful forced unpaid labour schemes lawful, to the emergency retroactive legalisation they used to retrospectively legalise the UK state's unlawful snooping on its own citizens.

The problem of course is that the idea of retroactively reversing No Deal is dangerously legally-illiterate gibberish.

If Remainers simply allow Boris Johnson and the Brextremists to conduct a 'No Deal by default' meltdown, the UK will have legally left the EU, and put itself in an extraordinarily weak negotiating position.

Even if the UK parliament does cobble together some absurd retroactive legislation aimed at retracting our departure as if it never happened, it quite obviously wouldn't bind the EU into letting us back into their club under the previously favourable conditions.

Even if retroactively pretending that we didn't actually leave wasn't wishing for unicorns from a legal perspective, why on earth would the EU just let us back in when we'd have put ourselves in the unprecedentedly weak position of having no trade deal with them, and no trade deals with anyone else either?

If we wanted to get back in, we'd be in the position of pathetically begging them, and they'd be under no obligation whatever to give us back the extremely favourable deal we'd just thrown away.

And ludicrous retroactive efforts to force them to give us back what we just threw away would serve as a further national humiliation as the rest of Europe laughed away our impotent legally-illiterate efforts to bully them from our self-imposed position of weakness.

Even if it wasn’t legally-illiterate gibberish, the idea that No Deal could simply be undone is as delusional as the idea that the damage from austerity fanaticism could just be undone by stopping the cuts. 

The shattered businesses, and lost jobs, wasted £billions, and millions of hours mitigating the chaos under a No Deal meltdown wouldn’t just magically grow back, just like the 130,000 dead from austerity cuts to the NHS and social care won’t magically rise from the grave.

This idea of retroactively cancelling No Deal is utterly absurd from a legal and practical perspective, but it's also incredibly dangerous.

It's dangerous because it creates the impression among Remainers that a No Deal Brexit meltdown can just be undone using a bit of legislative trickery.

'Just legislate that our decision to leave didn't actually happen and the whole thing just goes away!'

'No Deal Brexit isn't really a threat because we can magic it away in the future!'

'Let's just let Boris Johnson and the Brextremists push the UK economy over a No Deal cliff edge, then we can retroactively fix all the damage later!'

These are staggeringly dangerous, complacency-breeding, lines of thought.

If you're gullible enough to take centrists like Lib-Dems and CUK squatters at their word that stopping No Deal is their main priority, then letting No Deal happen based on the absolute fantasy that it can supposedly be reversed later via legislative trickery seems like utter nonsense.

But it's actually fairly easy to see what this utterly lamentable gibberish is motivated by.

Pro-austerity, privatisation scamming, welfare-vandalising, disability-persecuting, Corporate Tax cutting, public service trashing, workers' rights attacking, orthodox neoliberal centrists fear the idea of Jeremy Corbyn derailing their gravy train even more than they fear a No Deal Brexit (which will mainly hammer the poor and ordinary, not the Westminster establishment club and the other gilded classes).

In order to justify their outright refusal to work with Corbyn and the Labour left to stop a ruinous Tory-administered No Deal meltdown, they're selling themselves the ridiculous idea that No Deal is actually 'not that big a problem at all', with the impossible and legally-illiterate fantasy that it can be easily reversed with retroactive legislation after it's been done.

So next time you see any Remainer deceitfully accusing Corbyn and the Labour left of "enabling Tory Brexit" or "secretly wanting a No Deal meltdown" (despite all of their votes against it in parliament, and all their condemnations of the Tory No Deal threats), just remind them of Heidi Allen's ludicrous plan to simply allow Tory No Deal Brexit to happen based on the nonsense fantasy that it can be magically reversed at some point in the future with retroactive 'let's pretend it didn't happen' legislation.

Ask them to explain the sense in this absolute nonsense, and why she’s an irreproachable hero to Centrist Remainers despite wanting to allow Tory No Deal, while Corbyn and the Labour left-are hate figures to Centrist Remainers despite repeatedly attempting to actually block Tory No Deal chaos.

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The terrifying right-wing contempt for justice and the rule of law

The underlying contempt for justice amongst many on the political right has been clear for some time. It's come to the fore in recent times with the British right-wing propaganda rags attacking judges as "enemies of the people" and now Donald Trump Twitter abusing a well respected judge for daring to over-rule his Muslim ban as unconstitutional, but for those of us who have been paying attention, it's been an obvious problem for a long time.

You only have to look back at Theresa May's appalling track record at the Home Office to see manifestations of this opposition to the concept of open justice.

One of the big alarm bells was the introduction of Secret Courts through "Justice and Security" legislation in 2013. This legislation fundamentally undermines the concept that justice needs to be seen to be done in order to be effective. If people can be locked up by a court they can't enter on charges they don't know relating to evidence they're not allowed to see, then how can anyone know that the justice system is being administered fairly?

Theresa May's reaction to the Edward Snowden revelations was telling. Instead of seeking justice against the people who had been unlawfully stealing the private communication data of millions of British people and businesses, she introduced rushed legislation to temporarily legalise what they had been doing unlawfully for years (Dripa) and then permanently legalised mass data retention and snooping by all manner of non-terrorism related state agencies through the Snoopers' Charter, an act that also retroactively legalised the criminal behaviour of the surveillance state and allows the state to lie in court in order to secure convictions!.

Theresa May's next huge display of contempt for the rule of law came when she attempted to bypass parliament entirely out of a desire to conduct the Brexit process as an autocrat who gets to make and repeal laws at their personal will, free from legislative or judicial oversight.

As this astounding power grab was defeated in the courts the right-wing press went into an unprecedented frenzy of condemnation. The tabloid hatchet jobs on the judges who ruled in favour of parliamentary sovereignty (against autocracy) were absolutely shocking. It's hard to imagine how anyone could be uneducated enough not to be horrified at the Daily Mail describing judges as "enemies of the people", but millions of people actually applauded these displays of contempt for the rule of law under the delusion that High Court judges are the evil metropolitan elite, and Theresa May is some kind of not-at-all dictatorial woman of the people!

Revealing their true character Theresa May and the Tories refused to condemn the appalling tabloid hatchet jobs on the judges. As far as they were concerned a wave of public contempt towards the justice system was exactly what they needed in order to disempower parliament and the courts and centralise even more political power in the hands of the Theresa May and the Tory party.

Credit: Sousa & Machedo Arts

The refusal of the Tory government to condemn the abuse of judges was deeply shocking, but the sight of an actual President of the United States actively delegitimising and threatening judges is pretty near top-level craziness.

Trump signed an astonishing 22 Executive Orders in his first couple of weeks as President. It soon became clear that he didn't even bother to read some of them. He apparently had little idea that Steve Bannon had promoted himself onto the National Security Council in one of the Orders he signed without bothering to understand. 

It's no wonder that this blizzard of hastily drafted Executive Orders is falling foul of the United States constitution. Trump's Muslim Ban was so profoundly unconstitutional it's astonishing that it was ever enacted. Not as astonishing though as Trump's petulant and abusive reaction to being denied his own way by the justice system.

You don't have to be an expert in the history of the American justice system to understand that a sitting President publicly lambasting a judge for the "crime" of upholding the constitution of the United States is utterly extraordinary stuff.

Neither do you have to be an expert in the authoritarian dictatorships of the 20th Century to see that contempt for the rule of law goes hand-in-hand with despotism. There's little excuse for not at least having heard of the political show trials in Nazi Germany, the Great Purge in Soviet Russia or the campaigns of extrajudicial killings carried out by US backed Latin American dictators.

My mention of Soviet Russia makes it clear that justice-hating despots can come from the left or the right, but modern manifestations of this contempt for justice are clearly coming from the political right:Theresa May's repeated assaults on the justice system; the Britain First leader openly calling for instant lynch mob killings on the streets;  the baying attacks on judges from extreme-right propaganda rags like the Daily Mail and the Express,  the Michigan Republican leader Dan Adamini calling for a repeat of the 1970 Kent State shooting of unarmed protesters; Donald Trump Twitter-ranting about the judge who dared to defy his Muslim Ban by upholding the US constitution.

It's pretty clear where this contempt for justice stems from. Wielders of political and economic power like to see justice system as something that exists primarily to defend their interests. They certainly don't see it as something that exists in order protect the interests of ordinary people from them.

The establishment elitists see justice as a commodity that can be bought and sold, not something that exists to serve everyone. Thus the extraordinary tantrums when the justice system intervenes to prevent them carrying out some of their appalling schemes.

The rage of the Express and the Daily Mail against the judges who ruled to protect the concept of parliamentary sovereignty, and the rage of Donald Trump against the judge who upheld the United States constitution both come from the same essential source. The hard-right craving for despotism and the establishment of a permanent dictatorship of those with the most capital.

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The surveillance states in Britain and the US are now in the hands of maniacs

When people warned of the dangers of the ever more intrusive surveillance state and the growing indifference to international law and human rights amongst the political elites in the UK and US those elites and their cheerleaders scoffed at us. "Trust us" they said, pointing their fingers at bogeymen like Islamist extremists and paedophiles to justify their construction of an all-seeing surveillance state that would have made the East German Stasi turn green with envy.

Somehow the UK has now ended up with Theresa May's appointment as Prime Minister by a tiny band of Tory party elitists. As Home Secretary she was responsible for the introduction of all kinds of illiberal monstrosities. When the Snowden leaks revealed the massive scale of illegal data-trawling by the British secret services, she quickly helped them to cover up the lawlessness of their actions with the introduction of DRIPA. In 2013 she trashed the concept of open justice by introducing secret courts where a person can have their fate decided in a courtroom they're not allowed to enter, on charges they are not allowed to know based on evidence they are not allowed to see.

Not only has Theresa May enacted these appalling attacks on our traditional rights and liberties, she's keen as mustard to do more. She's been pushing her free-speech destroying "counter-extremism" measures to silence and intimidate innocent people who have committed no crime whatever. She's also been pushing her freedom-destroying "snoopers' charter" to allow the secret services to continue the mass trawling and retention of the private communication data of millions of innocent people. She's also spoken out time and again against British people having human rights, and is as keen as mustard to tear up our human rights and replace them with a set of allowances for the "lower orders" drawn up by her and her elitist Tory chums.

Across the Atlantic things are now even worse than Britain. Barack Obama spent his two terms in office overseeing the spread of the surveillance state, continuing George W. Bush's catastrophic interventionist foreign policies and massively expanding the US drone warfare programme.

Now that the American public have rejected the appallingly uninspiring "more of the same" Wall Street stooge of a presidential candidate the Democratic Party elite foisted on them, this horrifying military and surveillance state infrastructure has been handed over to a bigoted and mentally unstable maniac.

For hundreds of years people have been warning about the dangers of allowing the state to scrap our rights and liberties in order to supposedly ensure our safety. In 1755 the US founding father Benjamin Franklin said that "those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety", but people have failed to heed the warnings and we now find ourselves in a situation where these extraordinary new surveillance powers have fallen into the hands of a pair of dangerous maniacs.

In Britain Theresa May is determined to set the precedent that she can rule as dictator-in-chief by attempting to bypass parliament completely in order to make up the law of the land to suit herself. She's already proven her extreme dictatorial tendencies as Home Secretary, and now she's determined to grab as much political power for herself as she can get away with so that she can run the UK as a hard-right autocrat.

In the United States things are even worse. Donald Trump's fascistic proposals to impose religious purity tests at all US borders demonstrate his complete and utter contempt for the US constitution, and he's actually on record as saying "I wish I had that power. Man, that would be power" when asked about having the power to hack his political opponents (a crime that resulted in Richard Nixon being the only President in history who was forced to resign in disgrace).

What is more is that both of these blatant extremists have access to the nuclear launch codes. Theresa May has already bragged to parliament that she would willingly incinerate 100,000 innocent men women and children in a nuclear fireball if she wanted to, and 22% of Trump supporters voted for him despite thinking that he would trigger nuclear Armageddon if elected President!

The idea that the state is a force for good that would never abuse its military and surveillance powers in order to secure the interests of powerful elites was always an utterly naive fantasy - even at times when our political leaders weren't a deranged right-wing authoritarian and a bigoted and mentally unstable demagogue - but the warning was always there. Opponents of the ever expanding military-security complex have always argued that those powers were bad enough in the hands of any government, but that things could always easily get a lot worse upon the election of some lunatic or other.

And now look what's happened.

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Nick Clegg has got a book to sell

The former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has a book to sell.

Some of the criticism of Tory politicians that Clegg and his fellow Lib-Dems enabled into power is quite extraordinary, and raises the obvious question of why on earth he didn't speak out at the time.

Take this extraordinary quote as an example:

"Welfare for Osborne was just a bottomless pit of savings, and it didn't really matter what the human consequences were, because focus groups had shown that the voters they wanted to appeal to were very anti-welfare, and therefore there was almost no limit to those anti-welfare prejudices"

George Osborne repeatedly inflicted harsh welfare spending cuts (especially on disabled people, the working poor and children) whilst simultaneously handing out tax breaks to corporations and the super-rich. Between 2010 and 2015. He could only do this because Nick Clegg and his fellow Lib-Dem MPs voted in favour of one savage piece of Tory anti-welfare legislation after another.

Clegg now admits that he knew all along that George Osborne's cuts to social security were not driven by necessity but actually by a desire to appeal to a small savagely right-wing demographic of voters.

He also admits that the cuts were made without regard for the catastrophic human consequences of huge numbers of vulnerable people and children being driven into absolute destitution.

Clegg has openly admitted that he and his party voted in favour of policies despite knowledge that they were being implemented without regard for the human consequences.

Between 2010 and 2015 Nick Clegg could have spoken out at any time; He could have taken a stand and instructed his MPs to vote against some of Osborne's most brutal welfare cuts; He could have said tax cuts for the rich were completely unacceptable in the same budget as harsh welfare cuts for the poor; He could have crossed the floor and opposed Osborne's socially and economically destructive austerity agenda at any time - but he chose not to. He chose to go along with things that he knew to be wrong so that he could stay in power for a bit longer.

Clegg also laid into Theresa May accusing her of pandering to "the cardboard-cutout prejudices that large parts of her party have about Europe" and repeatedly trying to insert false statistics into official reports (tampering with official reports is Clegg has accused her of in the past too).

Nick Clegg and the so-called Liberals had plenty of opportunities to actually stand up to Theresa May by refusing to vote in favour of appalling illiberal legislation that came out of the Home Office. Some of the most egregiously illiberal things that Clegg and the Lib-Dems helped Theresa May to impose were Secret Courts (so a person can now have their fate decided in a courtroom they are not allowed to enter, on charges they are not allowed to know, based on evidence that they are not allowed to see), DRIPA (hastily covering up the unlawful activity that the UK secret services that was exposed by the Edward Snowden leaks) and minimum income thresholds for UK spouses (extremely discriminatory legislation designed to rip apart thousands of British families from poor and ordinary backgrounds).

Had Clegg and the Lib-Dems rebelled against any of this appallingly illiberal nonsense from Theresa May instead of actively voting in favour of it perhaps Theresa May's coronation as Prime Minister wouldn't have been such a foregone conclusion? 

In the Guardian article publicising his book, the three main regrets that Clegg has about his participation in the coalition government are detailed as the "punch in the face" he delivered to Lib-Dem voters by helping the Tories to erect a massive social mobility barrier by hiking  tuition fees (aspiration tax) to £9,000 per year, his appallingly pally press conference in the garden of 10 Downing Street when the Coalition deal was announced and his agreement to sit next to David Cameron during Prime Minister's Questions.

The first regret is so obvious that even someone like Clegg had to admit it. Stabbing one of your most loyal core demographics in the back is such a staggeringly inept move that it's extraordinary that nobody in the Lib-Dems (barring a tiny minority like Charles Kennedy) tried to stop it.

The other two regrets appear to stem more from Clegg's own vanity than any real introspection about what went wrong. Of course the gleeful press conference is excruciating in hindsight. Of course it was embarrassing to have sit next to David Cameron every week as he evaded questions, regurgitated scripted put-downs and lied incessantly. But the idea that these are two of the most important things he got wrong is ridiculously self-absorbed.

• By agreeing to throw Proportional Representation on the scrap heap and accept a referendum on an Alternative Vote system that he himself had described as "a miserable little compromise", Clegg massively let down people who want to see the UK electoral system made fairer and more representative.

• Clegg also let down political modernisers when he failed to secure the democratisation of the House of Lords. Instead of delivering an elected and accountable upper chamber, Clegg gladly sat back and watched David Cameron stuff almost 200 unelected peers into the £300 a day for life club. The Lib-Dems who ostensibly oppose the unelected House of Lords are now left in the ridiculous position where they have just 8 elected MPs, but 105 unelected peers in the bloated House of Lords.

• Clegg and the Lib-Dems didn't just vote through a load of George Osborne's savage welfare cuts, they also worked as ministers in Iain Duncan Smith's DWP. Anyone who witnessed the Lib-Dem MP Steve Webb's excruciating performances trying to defend Bedroom Tax will know how much damage that did to the party. 

• The failure of the Lib-Dems to challenge Theresa May on savagely illiberal legislation like Secret Courts, her toxic anti-immigrant ranting or her track record of incompetence was completely unacceptable. Had the Lib-Dems tried to hold her to account for her extremism and incompetence instead of biting their tongues for five long years, perhaps this inept and fanatically right-wing authoritarian woman wouldn't now be considered "a safe pair of hands" by quite as many people.

• Anyone who started following the Lib-Dems because of Charles Kennedy's principled opposition to the invasion of Iraq must have been horrified by the Lib-Dems involvement in the mess in Libya. Imagine the levels of delusion necessary to believe that Libya is now better off now that it's civil society has been reduced to ruins and the country has been overrun by ISIS.

• Andrew Lansley's top-down reorganisation of the NHS designed to carve it up into little pieces and then give them away his private sector mates (who donate hundreds of thousands of pounds to the Tory Party) was only passed thanks to Lib-Dem votes in the House of Commons and the House of Lords. The facts that such an NHS privatisation-by-stealth policy was not included in the manifesto of either coalition party, and that David Cameron had explicitly ruled out a top-down reorganisation of the NHS didn't bother the Lib-Dems at all. Handing huge slices of the NHS to a bunch of Tory donors was part of the price they were willing to pay for a tiny taste of second hand Tory power.

• Before the 2015 General Election Vince Cable was popular because he talked a bit of economic sense. After the General Election he switched to parroting George Osborne's austerity gibberish. Switching from talking sense to repeating the exact kind of rubbish he was criticising before the election was one of the most infuriating U-turns I've ever seen, and clearly motivated by political expediency rather than any genuine conversion to austerity fetishism.

• Another staggering Lib-Dem U-turn was delivered by the Lib-Dem energy minister Ed Davey, who went from saying "In addition to posing safety and environmental risks, nuclear power will only be possible with vast taxpayer subsidies or a rigged market" in 2006 to lavishing heaps of praise on Cameron and Osborne's crackpot price-rigging scheme to bribe the French and Chinese into building a new nuclear reactor in 2013. 

The betrayal over tuition fees was clearly the most visible of the Lib-Dem sell-outs, but it was far from the only one they needed to do in order to keep their six figure ministerial salaries and their chauffeur driven cars. They sold out on pretty much all of their core principles. They betrayed the students, they shafted the political reformers, they abandoned economic sense to endorse Osborne's destructive austerity agenda, they drove away the anti-imperialists that Charles Kennedy attracted to the party, and they assisted Iain Duncan Smith in his mission to trash the welfare state that was originally envisaged by the Liberal MP William Beveridge.

It's incredible that the Lib-Dems betrayed so many of their core demographics, drove away two thirds of their voters and pretty much wiped themselves out in their traditional strong areas of Scotland and the south west of England, yet Clegg is so self-obsessed that he cites that excruciatingly chummy press conference with David Cameron as one of his biggest regrets.

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Theresa May: authoritarianism and incompetence

With the majority of Labour Party MP having decided to commit collective suicide in response to the Brexit vote by launching a pre-planned and incredibly ill-timed coup attempt against their party leader, it looks highly likely that the Tory leadership contest is going to determine which direction post-Brexit Britain goes in, and the right-wing tabloid press have already chosen their favourite. 

Theresa May represents the right-wing authoritarian faction of conservatism. She doesn't just believe in the classic Tory stuff like the upwards redistribution of wealth, deregulated financial services and mass privatisation of public property, but she also has a belief that the government has a right, or even a duty, to interfere in the lives of citizens as much as possible.

She also hates the concept of human rights with a passion, believing that our human rights should be scrapped and replaced with a set of Tory allowances. She's been pushing this policy for years.

Toxic legislation

May has served as Home Secretary since the Lib-Dems enables the Tories back into power in 2010. In her time in office she has been responsible for some of the absolute worst legislation to come out of David Cameron's government. 

• The ban on Khat: Against pretty much all advice from drug experts May decided to make the mild stimulant Khat illegal. It is similar in addictiveness and harm to coffee, and is mainly used by Somalian communities).

• Secret Courts: Theresa May introduced new legislation to introduce secret courts (which applies to civil as well as criminal courts). This means that a defendant can have their fate determined in a courtroom they are not allowed to enter, on charges that they are not allowed to know, based on evidence that they are not allowed to see.

• Ripping apart British families: Theresa May oversaw the introduction of harsh and discriminatory income thresholds for the non-EU spouses of British citizens. These ridiculous rules discriminate against people in poorer communities, and against women. May's draconian crackdown has left tens of thousands of British families with the awful choice of living in exile from their own country, or living apart/splitting up.

• DRIPA: When the Snowden leaks revealed that the UK intelligence services had been doing all kinds of unlawful spying activity without any parliamentary approval, Theresa May rushed through emergency legislation to make the unlawful mass trawling of data and other things lawful. Shockingly, only 48 MPs opposed this appalling cover up operation.

• Psychoactive Substances Act: Theresa May decided that banning mild stimulants like Khat wasn't enough and that the UK should ban all drugs (whether they even actually exist or not) except things on a pre-approved government list which includes two of the most harmful, addictive and lucrative substances of all: Alcohol and Tobacco. Despite evidence that the introduction of a similar law in Ireland had coincided with a massive spike in the numbers of people using novel psychoactive substances, and complaints from law enforcement specialists that the "ban everything, even if it doesn't exist" law was completely unworkable, May pushed it through anyway.

• Deporting workers: In April 2016 Theresa May oversaw the introduction of new rules to deport non-EU workers from the UK for the "crime" of earning less than £35,000 per year. Thus people who have come to the UK to work and contribute to society as teachers, nurses, care workers, other health specialists, engineers, IT experts and all manner of other professions face being thrown out of the UK because the Tories believe that anyone who earns below £35,000 (the vast majority of workers in the UK, immigrant or not) is useless scum.  

Incompetence

In 2010 Theresa May vowed to reduce net migration to below 100,000 per year, but by 2015 net migration had increased to an all time record high of 330,000. Instead of acknowledge her appalling failure to deliver her promise, she had the absolute gall to launch a sickening tirade of anti-immigrant fearmongering and recycle her broken 100,000 per year promise!

The Psychoactive Substances Act (detailed above) is another example of severe incompetence. Not only did she imitate a disastrously failed policy from Ireland, she also pushed on with it despite experts in the field condemning it as completely unworkable.

The reason Theresa May hates human rights so much is her incompetent efforts to deport the hate preacher Abu Qatada. He fought several successful appeals against deportation, but was eventually deported anyway. Theresa May blames the concept of human rights for the repeated failures to deport him, but she's the real culprit. She managed to deport him eventually, so if she'd found a way to deport him without ignoring his human rights in the first place, she could have deported him the first time around. Just because Theresa May and her team can't be arsed to learn the law and abide by it in their actions, doesn't mean that the law should be scrapped.

The future

Theresa May has been working on a number of other right-wing authoritarian plots. One of them is a brazen assault on civil liberties dressed up as an attempt to counter Islamist extremism. The plan involves scrapping long held British liberties like freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, the presumption of innocence and the right to privacy in order to silence and oppress so-called "extremists" who haven't actually broken any laws whatever. Anyone who thinks that a law that can revoke the freedom of speech from people who have not broken any law whatever will only ever be used to combat Islamist fanaticism is clearly very naive and unaware of the concept of function creep.

Another of Theresa May's right-wing authoritarian schemes is to scrap our human rights and replace them with a set of Tory allowances. The whole idea of the European Convention of Human Rights was that there should be a set of minimum standards below which no country could fall. It was a British idea championed by Winston Churchill (Tory) and Clement Attlee (Labour) after the Second World War in order to try to prevent what happened in Nazi Germany ever happening again. If Theresa May ends up dragging the UK out of the ECHR, then we would join the severely authoritarian post-Communist dictatorship of Belarus as the only non-signatories on the whole continent of Europe.

Conclusion

Theresa May embodies a terrifying mix of barkingly right-wing politics, severe moral authoritarianism and brazen incompetence.

The vision of a post-Brexit UK led by this appalling woman is beyond nightmarish. It's bad enough that David Cameron allowed her to continue her reign of savage right-wing authoritarianism and incompetence for six long years at the Home Office, if she becomes Prime Minister, there's no telling how bad things could get.

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Welcome to Stasi UK

  

British people generally like to think of the United Kingdom as a benign democratic country, and not some kind of increasingly warped authoritarian state.

Of course British democratic and judicial institutions inspired liberal democracies across the world, but times have moved on since the UK was a relative bastion for free-thought during the 19th Century.Times have also moved on since Britain was a safe haven from authoritarian regimes on the continent (Italy under Mussolini, Hitler's Third Reich, Spain under Franco, The Greek military dictatorship, the Soviet states ...) during the 20th Century.

Nowadays the UK is governed by one of the most right-wing authoritarian regimes in the world, one that is determined to erode the rights of citizens as much as possible and establish powerful state surveillance apparatus that would have made agents of the East German Stasi or the Russian KGB turn green with envy.

Progress so far

New Labour

Even before the Tories came to power in 2010 Tony Blair's New Labour government had changed tack dramatically. From a government that introduced liberal open-government reforms like the Freedom of Information Act and the Human Rights Act, they became one that was determined to erode long established rights and liberties by removing to right to trial by jury, attempting to introduce Guantanamo Bay style long-term detention without charge rules, and their complicity with US kidnap-torture flights (including allowing kidnap-torture flights to fly in and out of UK territories).

The Edward Snowden leaks revealed that mass Internet surveillance in the UK was well under way long before the Tories came to power in 2010.

Secret Courts

As detestable as the late New Labour regime became, their efforts to make the UK a more authoritarian state pale in comparison to what the Tories have been up to for the last six years, (in collusion with the so-called Liberal Democrats between 2010 and 2015).

One of the most shockingly illiberal pieces of legislation the Lib-Dems helped the Tories to pass through parliament was the 2013 Justice and Security Act, which legislated "secret courts" into existence. There was very little mainstream media coverage of this appalling piece of legislation, which introduced a quasi-judicial system where a person could have their fate decided in a courtroom they are not allowed to enter, on charges they are not allowed to know, based on evidence they are not allowed to see.

DRIPA

Another piece of appalling legislation introduced by the Tories (in collusion with the Liberal Democrats and a large number of New Labour MPs too) was DRIPA, which was introduced as "emergency legislation" to allow the secret services to carry on doing the mass trawling of private communications data they had been previously doing illegally for years, with no parliamentary approval or oversight whatever.

Had the Snowden leaks not come out it's inconceivable that such powers would ever have been legislated. The secret services would simply have been allowed to continue trawling private data and hacking whoever they liked with no parliamentary scrutiny whatever.

Grass up your neighbour

One of the most Stasi-like policies of all has been the introduction of "grass up your neighbour" hotlines at the DWP. The idea of encouraging the general public to report their neighbours for suspected benefit fraud is exactly the kind of system used by the East German secret services in order to turn citizens against each other and promote a culture of fear and suspicion.

Creating a network of citizen-spies is appalling enough as it is, but when we get to examining the outcomes of such a system the true horror of it becomes apparent. Of the 1 million+ cases investigated on the basis of tip-offs to "grass up your neighbour" hotlines, more than 85% of them were found to be false accusations, with no evidence of benefit fraud whatever.

The procedure for investigating benefit fraud means that DWP agents can stop all benefits payments, carry out intrusive investigations into people's private circumstances, and make them answer questions in stressful interviews (often under police caution). Well over 880,000 innocent people were subjected to this kind of treatment based on nothing more than being grassed up by nosy neighbours who had no actual evidence of wrongdoing whatever.

The danger of introducing such a "grass up your neighbour" system is that it can be used by bitter vindictive people to trash the lives of personal enemies, or people they just resent out of bitterness or jealously. There were plenty of foul-minded people in East Germany who would make false malicious reports to the Stasi in order to wreck other people's lives, and it's worth wondering how many of the 880,000+ false reports to the DWP were motivated more by vindictive personal animosity than any genuine suspicion of wrongdoing.

What is in the pipeline?

The Snoopers' Charter

The most obvious and immediate Tory policy designed to make the UK a significantly more authoritarian state is Theresa May's Snoopers' Charter, which was slammed by a cross party group of MPs, yet has been redrafted in order to give the police and intelligence services even more draconian powers than were in the previous draft!

The Snoopers' Charter will allow agents of the state to mass trawl the private communications data of millions of innocent people with complete impunity, and it will allow the police to pick through people's browser histories and even hack into their devices without even having to obtain a warrant by providing any kind of evidence of wrongdoing to a judge beforehand.

If the Snoopers' Charter is not defeated, it will mean that the UK will have legislated the most intrusive state surveillance powers in the western world. We will become a country where concepts like the right to privacy and the presumption of innocence will have been relegated to the dustbin of history.

Extremist counter-extremism measures

Theresa May is also pushing through more extremely authoritarian proposals to crack down on our rights and liberties under the guise of countering extremism. The proposed powers under Theresa May's "Extremism Orders" are mind-bogglingly authoritarian. Her proposals would allow the state to revoke people's freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and right to privacy even with no evidence whatever that they've actually committed a crime. A state that gives itself the power to ban people from expressing themselves without presenting a single shred of evidence that they have ever actually broken a law, would be a thoroughly authoritarian one that has actually legislated the Orwellian concept of thought crime into existence.

David Cameron summed up this terrifying Tory attitude that the state has the right to interfere in the lives of law abiding citizens with his post-election statement 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". The only possible conclusion from a statement like this is that David Cameron wants the UK to be an actively intolerant society that persecutes people even if they have committed no crime whatever.
   
Scrapping human rights

There should be little mystery as to why the Tories are so desperately keen to scrap our human rights. All sorts of right-wing authoritarian Tory legislation over the last six years conflicts with the 18 rights protected by the European Convention on Human Rights.

If the Tories were to withdraw from the ECHR, the UK would set an appalling precedent as the first western country ever to unilaterally withdraw from a human rights agreement. Such a withdrawal would clearly send a strong signal to appalling dictatorships across the world, that as far as the British government are concerned, human rights are purely optional.

Trashing labour rights

The latest Tory assault on working people is their Trade Union Bill which puts almost impossible turnout stipulations on trade union ballots, without allowing trade unions to modernise their voting procedures in order to actually increase turnouts and make themselves more democratic.

The UK already has some of the most severe anti-trade union laws in the developed world, and the Tories are determined to further crush the ability of working people to come together in solidarity to achieve better working conditions for themselves.

The 50% turnout rule looks as if it has been designed with the express intention of rendering trade union democracy completely unworkable. I mean what other reason would there be for introducing rules that transform an abstention into a stronger vote against strike action than an actual vote against strike action?

If the Tories introduced 50% turnout thresholds for political positions, they wouldn't be such appalling hypocrites, but they have no intention of doing that, because it would render every single Tory PCC, nearly all Tory politicians in local government, all Tory MEPs, several Tory MPs and the (especially hypocritical) Tory Mayor of London unemployed.

As is always the case with the Tories, it's one set of rules for entitlement class, and a completely different set of rules for the plebs.

Silencing critics

One of the hallmarks of repressive authoritarian regimes is that they will not tolerate criticism.

The Tories (with the assistance of the Illiberal Democrats) have already introduced a gagging law to prevent charities, community groups, religious organisations and trade unions from criticising government policy. Now they want to go one step further by banning any organisation that receives government funding (including university research departments) from lobbying the government or criticising government policy (whilst they allow multinational corporations and wealthy Tory party donors to continue influencing government policy to such an extent that they are even invited to draw up their own laws).

Conclusion

The United Kingdom is heading down an extremely dangerous path, yet so many people remain utterly complacent, and like every extremist authoritarian regime in history, there's also a crowd of idiots cheering the Tories every step of the way.

It's as if the British public are so apathetic and ignorant of human history that they can't even imagine that a brutal totalitarian government could ever arise in the UK.

Make no mistake about it. Theresa May is an extremely dangerous right-wing authoritarian. The fact that she's been allowed to cook up one dreadful piece of desperately inhumane and/or severely totalitarian legislation after another, whilst spitting poisonous anti-immigrant rhetoric, for six long years is utterly appalling.

If things continue the way they have been going, the UK will soon have the most authoritarian state surveillance laws in the developed world (with snooping powers that the East German Stasi could only ever have dreamed of), and the rights to free speech and privacy will have gone the same way as the right to a fair trial has already gone.

What we can do about it

Get involved with an organisation that works to protect rights and liberties in the UK and across the world: There are loads, here are just a few: Liberty, War on Want, Open Rights Group, Amnesty International, Privacy International, Statewatch, Article 19.

Write to your MP: It's easy to write to your MP or your other political representatives. As long as you include your full name and address, your MP has a statutory obligation to reply to you. It is helpful to ask a number of specific questions in your correspondence, otherwise they can easily fob you off with a copy n' paste boilerplate reply. Follow this link.

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 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 
         
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David Cameron's Orwellian word games
                     
The hypocritical Tory plan to ruin trade union democracy
       
Dog whistles and dead cats
                             
How the mainstream media frame the political debate
                
Secret Courts and the very Illiberal Democrats
                      

How the mainstream media give George Osborne a free pass
                                
Margaret Thatcher's toxic neoliberal legacies