13 things everyone should know about the ECHR

Priti Patel's Rwanda deportation flight was never actually intended to take off.

It was a £500,000 publicity stunt designed to ramp up the culture war against the European Convention on Human Rights, and the court that protects these rights and liberties.

The Tory ploy was to deliberately try to break the law, in order to claim that the nasty Europeans are preventing us from doing what we want to, and agitate for Britain to leave the jurisdiction of the ECHR.

Given that the UK government is intent on whipping up culture war propaganda against it, here are 13 things that people should know about the ECHR:

It's got nothing to do with the EU

The ECHR has absolutely nothing to do with the EU. It's an independent institution established in 1950.

So all these far-right polemicists shouting "leave means leave" over the Rwanda situation are either thick as mince, or being deliberately misleading.

Churchill's finest legacy

Winston Churchill was a true enigma of a man. A right-wing racist who despised Indians and set soldiers on British workers, but a war leader in the fight against Nazism, and a man who promoted the idea of internationally accepted human rights to prevent the horrors of fascism from happening again.

The development of the ECHR was supported by both Churchill and Labour PM Clement Attlee, meaning anyone who wants to rip Britain out of of the ECHR is trashing the legacies of the favourite 20th Century Prime Ministers of both the right and the left!

Protection from fascism

The ECHR was designed to protect European citizens from fascism, and make sure nothing like the horrors of the Second World War could ever happen again. So you've really got to wonder about the true motivations of any government that wants to drag their country out of it.

The life's work of Johnson's own grandad

Boris Johnson's own grandfather James Fawcett was a member of the ECHR from 1962-1984, serving as its President from 1972-1982. He dedicated his life's work to human rights, and wrote books on international law, and the application of the ECHR.

It's not just an indication of the decline of Fawcett's family lineage that his own grandson is the radical-right philistine who is intent on wrecking his life's work, it's indicative of our national decline too.

For all of our many faults, Britain was once a great nation in some ways, stocked with decent, honest, earnest men like Fawcett who worked for the betterment of humanity.

These days we lift up and celebrate the absolute worst among us, like the bone-idle, incompetent, lying, philandering oaf who is intent on wrecking the life's work of his own grandfather, purely because he knows contemptuously undermining human rights and international law plays well to Britain's depraved hard-right capitalist media.

These days it's all about self-interest, not the betterment of others, and it's a crying shame that we've fallen so far as a nation in just a couple of generations.

Red meat for tabloid-addled reactionaries

It's hard to imagine the warped mindset of the kind of tabloid-addled reactionary who desperately wants to see their own human rights ripped up, purely because they're angry that their beloved Tory government couldn't unlawfully deport a few poor refugees, who they've never even met, and know nothing about.

But this kind of rabidly right-wing ultranationalist reactionary is Johnson's base. The Tories knew they couldn't win elections without attracting the millions who used to vote for UKIP and the BNP, so this policy of destroying our human rights is red meat, intended for their consumption.

ECHR protects British rights

We regularly hear about how the ECHR protects immigrants, by preventing the UK government from defying the law to deport them, but it also protects the rights of British citizens too.

It was thanks to the ECHR that the bans on homosexuality were lifted in Scotland and Northern Ireland; employers were prevented from discriminating against their workers on religious grounds; teachers were banned from brutalising children with corporal punishment; the ban on people in Gibraltar voting in general Elections was lifted; and the multiple rulings to protect the British public from police brutality.

A very British institution

The ECHR was largely drafted by British lawyers, and British judges have always been major players in the institution, with three of Britain's eight ECHR judges having served as president of the court (Nicholas Bratza, Humphrey Waldock, A.D. McNair). 

Only France and Italy out of the other 46 member states have even had two presidents of the court, and many nations have never had a single one.

Leaving would be Putinesque

In all of Europe, only Belarus has never signed up to the ECHR. The only countries to have walked out of it are Greece, after they suffered a violent military coup in 1969 (then re-joined 1974), and then Putin's Russia after the invasion of Ukraine.

Do we really want to join the brutal Papadopoulos Junta and Vlad Putin's Russia as the only European regimes to have torn up their own citizens' European rights?

Crucial to the Irish Peace Process

Boris Johnson has already made his contempt for the Irish Peace Process absolutely clear by barefaced lying that his Brexit deal wasn't going to create a border down the Irish Sea, creating a border down the Irish Sea, and then defying international law with his efforts to rip up the Northern Ireland Protocol after having told everyone it was a great deal, and signing us up to abide by it.

Britain can't quit the ECHR without ripping up the Good Friday Agreement, which stipulates that the UK have the ECHR enforceable in Northern Ireland.

This latest attack on the ECHR demonstrates that Johnson's contempt for the Irish Peace Process knows no bounds.

Internationally accepted rights, or a set of Tory allowances?

The Tories want to tear up the ECHR and replace it with a British "Bill of Rights" which will be drawn up by ministers from the billionaire-bankrolled Tory party!

What kind of idiot wants to have their internationally accepted rights lobbed in the bin, so that the radical-right ghouls Johnson has surrounded himself with can decide what rights and liberties they will and won't allow us to keep?

Know your rights

The first 18 Articles of the ECHR are the most fundamental. Most of the rest relate to technical details of how the court functions. Here are the rights that Boris Johnson and the Tories are seeking to rip up:

Why the British press hate it

Johnson is intent on attacking the ECHR because Britain's rabidly right-wing corporate media outlets hate it.

The main reason they hate it is because of Article 8, which guarantees British citizens the right to privacy, and prevents them from engaging in the phone-hacking and private surveillance scandals that led to the Levenson Inquiry.

They're still furious that they can't hack into our phones, private communications, medical records, etc ... to do stuff like leak gossip about celebrities and their families, smear left-wing and socially progressive figures, and release the private information of dead British soldiers.

Why the Tories hate it

The Tories hate the ECHR for a very similar reason to the right-wing capitalist media; it constrains their ability to make life worse for people.

• Whenever they want to deport immigrants (or black British citizens) they detest having to try to do it in a way that complies with the ECHR rules.

• When they defund the justice system and scrap entitlement to Legal Aid, they know that they're denying people the right to a free and fair trial.

• When they implement mandatory unpaid labour schemes for the unemployed, they know they're trampling over people's right not to be subjected to forced labour.

• When they bring in legislation to erase our ancient British right to participate in non-violent protest, they know they're attacking our rights to free expression, assembly, and association.

They hate the ECHR because it stands in the way of them being the vicious, malicious bastards that they really want to be.

Conclusion

I'm fairly certain that few could read all of this and still conclude that they want the Tories to trample all over Churchill's finest legacy by walking out of the ECHR, to join Belarus and Putin's Russia as Europe's only non-signatories.

You'd have to be the worst kind of simpleton to imagine that Johnson's billionaire-bankrolled Tories are better placed to decide what our fundamental rights and liberties should be, than a Europe-wide panel of human rights advocates and legal experts.

The big problem is that the kind of low-information voter this malicious anti-ECHR rabble-rousing is aimed at doesn't have the intellectual rigour to actually learn about the issue they're being programmed to froth about, or the patience/comprehension ability to read a detailed summary, if they were ever to somehow come across one.

it's bad enough that decades of failing education and exposure to radical-right capitalist media has created such an enormous demographic of reactionary low-information voters, but that the government actively panders to them like this is a national disgrace.

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Wake up Theresa: The UK is facing a 27 vs 1 diplomatic nightmare

On Thursday 27th April 2017, over ten months since the vote for Brexit, and almost a month since Theresa May set the clock ticking on the Brexit negotiations by triggering Article 50, the AFP news agency reported the "breaking news" that Theresa May has accused the other 27 EU countries of lining up to oppose Britain over Brexit!

It beggars belief that Theresa May came out with such a ridiculous statement, and that anyone consdered it newsworthy for any reason other than the fact that an actual British Prime Minster could have made such an extraordinarily slow-witted observation.

Of course the other 27 EU nations are opposing Britain over Brexit. It was obvious that Brexit was going to cause a massive diplomatic nightmare way before the referendum even took place.

• Who on earth could have imagined that the EU would bend over backwards to give Britain what it wants, even if we were departing their club on amicable terms (which we're certainly not under Theresa May's lamentable leadership)?

• For goodness sake. Why wouldn't they defend their own economic interests and the integrity of their union?

• What on earth would possess them to offer better terms to a departing member than the terms available to existing (fee-paying) members of their club?

The thing that makes this statement from Theresa May all the more ridiculous is that if anyone is most responsible for the hard line the EU diplomats and member states are taking, it's clearly Theresa May herself.

Theresa May is hardening attitudes against us with her displays of bellicose foot stamping belligerence and her disdain for the liberal values that have bound Europe together ever since the two great British statesmen Winston Churchill (Tory) and Clement Attlee (Labour) collaborated to ensure nothing as horrific as the Holocaust could ever happen again by enshrining liberal British values across the whole continent of Europe through the European Convention on Human Rights.

After an excruciating six months of "Brexit means Brexit" dithering Theresa May finally announced her so-called "negotiating strategy" in her infamous January 2017 clown costume speech unveiling the centrepiece of her strategy to be a ridiculous threat that boiled down to "give us what we want or we'll trigger an economic meltdown by stropping away from the negotiating table with nothing".

It hardly takes a genius to recognise that threatening to blow up an economic bomb over Europe is not the way to establish good diplomatic relations with the EU 27.

Aside from making this belligerent threat the centrepiece of her "negotiating strategy" Theresa May has also severely pissed off our 27 former European allies by showing utter disdain for human rights. She's threatening to attack Churchill's finest legacy by scrapping the human rights of all UK citizens and residents, and her government also voted down an opposition party amendment to her Article 50 Act that would have obliged the government to at least begin looking into the process of protecting the rights of EU citizens who are resident in the UK.

Theresa May's contempt for human rights has horrified politicians across the European political spectrum from the centre-right EPP group all the way across to the progressive left and the greens. Her insistence on treating the lives of 3 million EU citizens in the UK as bargaining chips in the reckless game of brinkmanship she's playing is probably even less popular on the continent.

It's quite extraordinary that the British public, egged on by the jingoistic shouting of the right-wing propaganda rags actually allow themselves to believe that Theresa May's ludicrous threats against the economy of the people we have to negotiate some kind of deal with, and her extreme-right disdain for liberal values are examples of the "strong and stable leadership" that she's always wittering on about like a broken robot.

If the British people vote for a strutting combative charlatan like Theresa May, when they can see full well that she's too cowardly even to face Jeremy Corbyn or the other party leaders in a live debate, they'll be sleepwalking into chaos.

On June 23rd 2016 absolutely nobody voted for Theresa May to adopt a belligerent and self-defeatingly combative "make it up as I goes along" approach to Brexit, but if the British public hand her a thumping parliamentary majority on June 8th, then we'd be giving her a mandate to deliver a total bloody disaster.

Don't say you weren't warned.

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OR

Did I fall asleep and wake up in Turkey?

The Daily Mail is an extreme-right propaganda rag that gleefully celebrated the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis and promoted Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists in the 1930s, so it's no surprise to see them giddy with joy at Theresa May's efforts to turn the UK into a fanatically right-wing one party state where anyone who dares to try and hold her to account gets "crushed".

"Crush the saboteurs" shrieks the Daily Mail front page, but it's important to remember who these saboteurs are:

First it was the High Court judges who did their job of protecting parliamentary sovereignty and ensuring that Theresa May couldn't just make up the laws of the land to suit her own interests with no democratic scrutiny whatever. "Enemies of the people" for standing up for parliamentary sovereignty!

The only thing the High Court judges were guilty of sabotaging was Theresa May's autocratic power-grab, and the furious tide of right-wing hatred and contempt towards the judiciary for holding their beloved leader to account was a real eye opener for anyone who believes that the government actually needs to be held to account by the judicial system.

Then it was the opposition parties and the House of Lords who tried to add a couple of amendments to the Article 50 bill that Theresa May would never have put through parliament at all if it weren't for the judges protecting democracy from her dictatorial tendencies.

One amendment was aimed at getting Theresa May to start working towards offering some reassurance and certainty to the estimated 3 million EU nationals who live in the UK. "No way" said the Tory party, "the lives of those people are bargaining chips in our power games. If we can't hang the sword of Damocles over their heads, then we won't be able to secure the quickfire pro-corporate anti-worker trade deal we're demanding from the EU". So the simple amendment to get the government to work towards treating these 3 million people as valued contributors to our society was thrown on the scrap heap.

The second amendment was to ensure that parliament gets some kind of meaningful vote on whatever the Brexit agreement turns out to be, but that was way too much democracy for Theresa May and the Tories, so that amendment got thrown out too. This means that the European Parliament will get a democratic vote on the Brexit deal, but the UK parliament won't. Not only that, but all of the national parliaments of the 27 EU states will get a vote on the post-Brexit EU-UK trade deal, but the UK parliament won't.

These efforts to democratically scrutinise what Theresa May is doing, and get her to work towards securing the lives and livelihoods of EU citizens in the UK are clearly far too much for Theresa May and her cheerleaders in the extreme-right press, so she's called a snap election (like she repeatedly promised that she wouldn't) so that she can crush all opposition to her autocratic scheming.

Headlines calling for all opposition to Theresa May's anti-democratic rule to be crushed look like something from Erdoğan's dictatorial regime in Turkey, where opposition politicians and journalists are rounded up and imprisoned, and non-violent demonstrations are ruthlessly repressed. Not something from the country that did so much to enshrine human rights across Europe when Winston Churchill (Tory) and Clement Attlee (Labour) collaborated to introduce the European Convention on Human Rights (you know, the Churchill legacy that Theresa May is so desperate to scrap).

It hardly seems like a coincidence that Recep Erdoğan was one of the first world leaders Theresa May went to beg for a post-Brexit trade deal after announcing her unbelievably crude threat-based Brexit "negotiating strategy" in her woeful January 2017 clown costume speech.

If the English electorate don't wake up soon and consider the horrifying implications of the socially and economically ruinous "no deal" scenario that Theresa May is slow-marching us towards, we're going to end up shunning the liberal democracies of Europe in order to suck up to some of the worst regimes and most unstable leaders in the world, like Erdoğan's Turkey, Donald Trump, Duterte in the Philippines and the barbaric Islamist tyrants in Saudi Arabia that Theresa May loves to grovel for so much.

If the Daily Mail are telling us to help Theresa May to eviscerate all opposition to her dream of turning the UK into a savagely right-wing authoritarian one party state where all dissent to her autocratic rule is crushed, it's about time to realise the importance of electing as many MPs who are willing to hold her to account as possible.

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OR

Why do people actually trust Theresa May to deliver Brexit?

Theresa May's two main political characteristics are her savage authoritarian streak and her abject incompetence, but somehow significant swathes of the public somehow trust her to deliver a good Brexit deal for Britain!

Incompetence

Given that fears over immigration played such a pivotal role in the EU referendum debate, the lack of scrutiny of Theresa May's woeful track record on immigration has been extremely noticeable, especially the silence of Brexiters and the anti-immigration right-wing propaganda rags.

In 2010 Theresa May arrived at the Home Office promising to cut net migration to below 100,000 but by 2016 she had overseen one all-time record high spike in immigration after another, yet somehow an awful lot of Brexiters have this bizarre misguided confidence that Theresa May is some kind of "safe pair of hands" who will steer us through the Brexit negotiations.

One of my favourite demonstrations of Theresa May's abject ineptitude was the time she gave a huge parliamentary shout out to a vile misogynistic, xenophobic extreme-right Twitter troll during Prime Minister's Questions. We all know how the press would have reacted had it been Jeremy Corbyn reading out a Tweet from a disgustingly abusive Twitter troll in order to score cheap political points, but as darling of the mainstream media Theresa May was allowed to totally get away with it.

Another example of Theresa May's incompetence is the shockingly inept "negotiation strategy" she took over six months to come up with. Not only is "give a load of favours to our corporate mates or we'll launch a mutually destructive nuclear Brexit" a woefully inept diplomatic gambit, it's also a completely ludicrous stance to take if you're not even drawing up a contingency plan in case you're actually made to play your bluff.

Yet another example of Theresa May's incompetence is the fact that she allowed Philip Hammond to include his manifesto pledge wrecking National Insurance hike in the spring budget, and didn't even brief her cabinet about what they were going to do. Attacking ordinary working people with tax hikes whilst giving handouts to their corporate mates was bad enough, but not even telling her inner circle what they were planning so that they could coordinate their excuse-making was so brazenly inept that even the right-wing press (Telegraph, Times, S*n, Spectator) picked up on it.

Authoritarianism

Theresa May's track record at the Home Office provides plenty of proof of her right-wing authoritarian streak. She's clearly the kind of person who thinks that the public exist to serve the will of politicians like her, rather than vice versa.

Theresa May introduced secret courts, discriminatory economic apartheid measures against British families, and Dripa, she oversaw the development of the extremist Snoopers' Charter, and she blabbered on endlessly about scrapping our human rights and introducing legislation to curtail the free speech of law-abiding citizens.

Since she became Prime Minister her authoritarian streak has got even worse. Who could forget her bragging about her willingness to commit mass indiscriminate genocide? Who could forget the passage of the Snoopers' Charter into actual law, meaning that our private communications data can be snooped on and trawled through by dozens of non-terrorism related state agencies like the Food Standards Agency, The Gambling Commission and the Health and Safety Executive?

Perhaps the most glaring example of Theresa May's authoritarian extremism was her effort to scrap the principle of parliamentary sovereignty in order to establish the precedent that she can make up and repeal laws at her own will, free from parliamentary scrutiny or approval. The fact that her attempt to turn Britain into her own personal autocracy was beaten in the High Court, and then beaten again at the Supreme Court is another demonstration of the incompetence I detailed above.

A lot of people used "freedom" as their justification for voting Brexit. Freedom from the unelected EU technocrats, freedom from EU laws ... that kind of thing. What I suspect they didn't vote for was the "freedom" to be treated as a worthless peasant who is undeserving of basic human rights by a power hungry hard-right autocrat.

Where does confidence in Theresa May's abilities stem from?

It's pretty well understood that once propaganda narratives have been set it's incredibly difficult to undo them, no matter how downright misleading they actually are. The reason being that it's a lot easier to fool a person than convince them they've been fooled.

The reason Theresa May was subjected to so little scrutiny as she was being appointed as leader of the Tory party, and consequently Prime Minister of the UK is absolutely obvious.

Instead of allowing the media to focus on the extraordinary failure of David Cameron's self-serving EU referendum gamble, his cowardly resignation, and the blatantly undemocratic coronation of his inept and savagely authoritarian successor, the Anyone But Corbyn mob decided to make their inept coup plot the main focus of the mainstream media headlines for the entire summer.

If Labour had spoken with a united voice in condemnation of the Tory Brexit shambles, the blatantly undemocratic Tory leadership election farce, and Theresa May's shocking track record at the Home Office, they could at least have established some public doubts about Theresa May's leadership and the ridiculous "safe pair of hands" trope being pushed by right-wing media hacks but instead they focused their efforts, and the mainstream media's attention on their ridiculous pre-planned coup against their own party leader!

Of course the hard-right dominated press were always going to be biased in favour of Theresa May, but by launching a cynical pre-planned revolt against their own leader at the least opportune time imaginable, the Labour Party right-wingers gave Theresa May the easiest ride possible, and allowed the mainstream media to go virtually unchallenged as they set the extraordinarily misleading propaganda narrative that this incompetent and dangerously authoritarian woman is some kind of "safe pair of hands".

In my view nobody is more responsible for the lack of scrutiny that Theresa May has benefited from than the coup-plotter Labour MPs.

 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 utter Tory contempt for traditional British values

One of the most commonly used Tory propaganda narratives is that there is a big problem with people who don't respect traditional "British values". The Tories love to cast themselves as the protectors of British values, and propose all kinds of draconian measures such as the abolition of free speech, the scrapping of the concept of innocent unless proven guilty and indoctrination schemes to instill a very Tory version of British values in all of our school children.

In this article I'm going to consider the shocking hypocrisy of a political party that claims to support and defend British values but which is actually engaged in an ideological war against long-established British values such as freedom of speech, the presumption of innocence, the right to a fair trial, and the right to be left alone by the state if you're a law abiding citizen.

The right to a fair trial

Not only is the right to a fair trial one of our most cherished British values, it's also one that has proven so popular that it has been adopted by liberal and democratic nations all across the world.

It should be a matter of pride to British people that our nation inspired the world in this way, but our ancient right to a fair trial has been severely eroded by the Tory party, and looks even more threatened by the Tory efforts to scrap the Human Rights Act and withdraw the UK from the ECHR.

One of the most blatant Tory attacks on the ancient British right to a fair trial was when they introduced Secret Courts so that defendants could be tried in a courtroom they are not allowed to enter, on charges they are not allowed to know, based upon evidence they are not allowed to see.

Anyone who thinks that such a crude assault on the concept of open and fair justice is compatible with British values must have a very different interpretation of British values to my own, and to those of anyone who believes that justice needs to be seen to be done fairly, otherwise it's not justice at all.

It's no surprise at all that the Tories want to get rid of our human rights, since their secret courts legislation is so blatantly at odds with Article 6 of the ECHR which states that "everyone is entitled to a fair and public hearing within a reasonable time by an independent and impartial tribunal established by law".

Freedom of expression

Another long-established British value is that people should be free to express their views, as long as those views are not incompatible with the law. Thus one person has the right to interpret British values in one way, while others may disagree very strongly indeed. What unifies the vast majority of versions of what British values are is that people should have the freedom to believe and express their own values, as long as they are not breaking the law by doing so.

The Tories are pushing forward with new measures to revoke this right to free speech. If Theresa May and David Cameron get their way, it will no longer matter whether the expressed opinion is lawful or not (or even if an opinion has been expressed at all) if the government or the security services take exception to the individual, they'll be able to ban them from freely expressing their views.

The Tories have used the age old "bogeyman tactic" to scare people into agreement, but a person would have to be completely ignorant of the concept of function creep to imagine that any such laws would only ever be used against suspected Islamist extremists. Once the state has awarded itself the ability to silence people with no evidence at all of any actual wrongdoing, who would be naive enough to imagine that such draconian restrictions on freedom of speech would never be used against other people too.

Another factor to consider is that once the right to free speech is abolished and these draconian new censorship laws are enforced, how would it even be possible for us to know that they weren't being used to censor law abiding citizens?

It's beyond obvious that the first thing the state would do if they were using these laws to censor people who aren't radical Islamists (political agitators, investigative journalists, environmentalists, people speaking out against high profile paedophile MPs, anti-corruption campaigners, whistleblowers etc) would be to prevent the targets from ever speaking out about the fact they are being censored by censoring them every time they try to complain about it.

Not only are these proposals to scrap the right to free expression at odds with traditional British values, they're also at odds with Article 10 of the ECHR which protects our "freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority"

The presumption of innocence

Another traditional British value that the Tories are ever so keen to scrap is the idea that people should be considered innocent until it is proven beyond reasonable doubt that they are guilty.

Theresa May's draconian new proposals to revoke the right to free expression from people who have broken no law whatever is clearly at odds with the presumption of innocence.

What Theresa May want to replace the presumption of innocence with is a system where agents of the state only need express a "reasonable belief" that the target might do something bad, in order for draconian restrictions on their freedom of speech and their freedom of assembly to be imposed.

If the Tories get their way then agents of the state will no longer have to actually prove that someone has done anything wrong, or even that they are planning to do anything wrong. All they will have to do is claim that they suspect that the person may at some point do something wrong. Essentially the Tory party are legislating against the possibility of thought crime. In order to be a potential target for these censorship proposals the individual won't even have to be guilty of thought crime! - All that it will take is for somebody in power to claim that they suspect that the individual may be guilty of thought crime in order for their freedom of expression to be revoked.

The right to privacy

Yet another traditional value in Britain that is under Tory attack is the idea that law abiding people have the right to privacy.

When the Edward Snowden leaks revealed that the British surveillance state was mass trawling the private communications data of countless millions of innocent people, and doing so without the approval or oversight of parliament, the Tory reaction was to rush through some "emergency legislation" to allow the security services to continue mass trawling our private communications data with complete impunity.

The idea that agents of the state should be able to trawl through our emails, our social media postings, our webcam conversations, our online transactions and all of our other private communications data is not only completely at odds with the traditional British belief that law abiding people have a right to privacy from state snooping, it's also at odds with Article 8 of the ECHR which enshrines a right to "respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence".

Freedom from harassment by the state

There are few British people of any political persuasion who would support the idea that the state should routinely harass law abiding citizens.

In May 2015 David Cameron famously complained that the British state is too tolerant, and declared his intention to make sure the state interferes more in the lives of law abiding citizens. If you read his actual words it's impossible to infer any other meaning:

"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'." - David Cameron, May 2015

It is interesting to note that this statement is about as clear an attack on an established British value as it is possible to make. Cameron clearly admits that freedom from state harassment is a long established British value, but one that he wants to see abolished and replaced with a system where law abiding citizens won't be left alone by the state.

David Cameron has clearly expressed the idea that the traditional British custom that law abiding people deserve to be left to get on with their own lives is somehow wrong and needs to be scrapped. To express such a thing is appalling enough in itself, but the fact that the person saying it loves to dress himself up as a protector of British values is even more repulsive.

Essentially what David Cameron is saying is that in order to "protect British values" we need to scrap British values.

Conclusion
I believe that stuff like the right to a fair trial, freedom of speech, the presumption of innocence, the right to privacy and freedom from harassment by the state are all long established British values, that are not only believed in by most British people, but also have very long historical precedents, some of them going back as far as the Magna Carta.

When David Cameron and Theresa May deliberately attack and destroy these concepts, they're actually guilty of attacking and destroying the British values they claim to be upholding.

The sad thing is that so many people are so easily fooled that all the Tories need to do is show them a picture of an Islamist extremist, then cast their plans to destroy long-established British values as the only alternative, and tabloid minded people will bleat for their own rights and values to be abolished.

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

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How David Cameron's Internet firewall would change the internet

This article will detail a number of practical considerations relating to the roll-out of mandatory opt-out national "porn firewalls" announced by David Cameron in July 2013. For a much more comprehensive article detailing various other considerations such as the morality of censorship, please see my previous article on the subject, and for a satirical look at the process that may have led to these proposals, please check out this purely hypothetical conversation.

Firewall implementation

The Prime Minister has clearly stated that these Internet censorship filters will be rolled out on an opt-out basis. If the legislation is passed (which is extremely likely given that all opponents will be smeared as pornography supporters and associated with rape porn, paedophilia and the corruption of childhood - an untenable position for the Labour party opposition) it seems likely that you will soon be presented with an option by your Internet Service Provider (ISP) which will probably look something like this.

Parental controls have been installed on your Internet connection.

In order to manage these controls select change settings.

[ticked box] Accept
[unticked box] Change settings

[NEXT]

If you chose to accept and leave the settings unchanged (as some 95% of computer users always do) the full "parental control" firewall will be installed automatically. If you chose to change the settings, you will likely be confronted with a second page, with "parental control" options which will appear something like this:

Deselect categories to disable filtering
[ticked box] Pornography
[ticked box] Games
[ticked box] Social Networking
[ticked box] File sharing sites
[ticked box] Alcohol
[ticked box] Smoking
[ticked box] Drugs
[ticked box] Violent material and weapons
[ticked box] Extremist and terrorist related content
[ticked box] Anorexia and eating disorder websites
[ticked box] Suicide related websites
[ticked box] Web forums
[ticked box] Esoteric material
[ticked box] Web blocking circumvention tools

[SAVE]

Note: The Open Rights Group have described a similar censorship regime, however, their site seems to be describing an opt-in configuration and the Prime Minister has explicitly stated that the "parental control" filters will be installed on an opt-out basis, hence the slight difference between what ORG state as a possibility and what I have described here.


Web user profiling

The fact that Internet users will be expected to either accept the firewall or to consciously opt out of various options will create an excellent opportunity for web user profiling. The ability of US and UK intelligence agencies to access our private information has been made absolutely clear from the Snowden revelations. Knowing people's choices in their firewall options will be of enormous benefit to intelligence agencies and the countless private sector subcontractors that they provide with open access to our private data and communications.

Perhaps the simplest way to think about web user profiling is to consider it as a kind of credit rating. People that accept the filter without altering the options will be considered "low risk", whilst those that change the options will increase the likelihood that they are subjected to surveillance. An individual that unblocks pornography, alcohol and cigarettes would probably still fall into a fairly "low risk" category, those that enable circumvention tools (P2P networks, Proxy websites, VPNs ...) would be considered "high risk" and anyone daft enough to deliberately unblock extremist and terrorist content would be basically asking to be put into the "very high risk" category and subjected to repeated state surveillance.

Web monitoring

That national surveillance organisations have the powers to compel private companies to reveal our private data to them is absolutely beyond question now. The roll out of so-called "parental control" filters at the national scale will be a wonderful opportunity for the surveillance state to access our online activity because all of our web activity will be funneled through the firewall programmes for vetting.

This kind of continuous monitoring is precisely the method already used by the TalkTalk firewall system that David Cameron has based his web censorship model upon. That the operator of the TalkTalk firewall, that David Cameron is full of praise for, is the Chinese company Huawei (which has been deemed a threat to American national security by US intelligence officials) seems to be of no concern at all to the Prime Minister.

Blacklisting

Dr Martyn Thomas, chair of the IT policy panel at the Institution of Engineering and Technology stated that:

"There's certainly a concern about the process of how a web address gets added to a blacklist - who knows about it? And who has an opportunity to appeal against it?"

Given that Cameron is full of praise for the unaccountable Huawei system operated by TalkTalk, it seems likely that the web monitoring systems will be installed on an ad hoc basis by the various ISPs with little or no accountability and no recourse to appeal should a website find itself added to the blacklist by the keyword algorithms used by the ISPs.

Essentially, if a website is found to include too many blacklisted words such as "porn", "rape", "sex", "violence", "war", "dieting tips", "depression", "play", "games", "chat", "forum", "Facebook", "Twitter", "suicide", "bet", "gambling", "terrorism", "Taliban", "weapons",  "spiritualism", "protest", "alcohol", "drugs", "beer", "cannabis", "smoking", "cigarettes" or contains any kind of chat facilities it will be automatically added to one or more of the web filtering categories and there will be little or nothing that the website owner will be able to do to reverse the censorship of their site.

There is however an alternative to algorithmic keyword blacklisting, which is the establishment of a national web monitoring and categorisation system. It may seem preferable to have a large bureaucracy of web monitors assessing which censorship categories a website will be subjected to, however there is absolutely nothing like this in the Conservative party proposals, and it would be extremely unlikely that they would set up an independent monitoring bureaucracy, given the normal methodology of the Tory party is the outsourcing of the functions of government to the private sector.

Conflicts of interest

If web censorship is left up to the individual ISPs to administer on an ad hoc basis (as seems likely), surely huge conflicts of interests may arise. Just as Tesco stopped stocking copies of Private Eye magazine after they exposed various dodgy Tesco tax-dodging scams, surely ISP will be tempted to use their new censorship powers to prevent their customers from gaining accessing websites that are critical of their business practices, or that expose their tax-dodging activities.

Accidental filtering

It is absolutely clear that whichever web censorship system is adopted (ad hoc algorithmic keyword analysis or a national censorship bureaucracy), mistakes will be made. There would obviously be more potential for mistakes with the probable ad hoc implementation of algorithmic censorship, since web crawling bots are unable to discern the correct context in which words are used, they'll simply stamp out websites that breech their arbitrary keyword analysis rules.

An independent web censorship bureaucracy would make fewer mistakes because human analysis should avoid the worst cases of arbitrary keyword censorship, since humans are more capable of determining words in their proper context. However mistakes will still be made, especially by people with personal agendas to push.

To demonstrate how a human administered system is fallible, perhaps we should consider how "pornography" is defined. To most people pornography probably means something like "content created explicitly for the purposes of sexual gratification", however this isn't really an accurate description. To a "pervert", kidswear catalogues or perfectly innocent pictures of children at the beach are pornographic material to be used for sexual gratification. Should access to these kinds of images be banned? How about the work of countless artists throughout the ages who have created artistic representations of the naked human form? To a prudish person working at a government censorship agency, the temptation to abuse their powers in order to censor things that are not actually explicitly pornographic, but which they disapprove of, would surely be overwhelming, especially if they knew that there was little oversight or recourse to appeal against their arbitrary decisions.

Web content

Whichever web censorship system is implemented (the almost certain ad hoc algo-bot arrangement favoured by David Cameron, or the state censorship bureau option) there will be a number of consequences for websites owners.

Sites that rely on commercial revenue will obviously be disincentivised from publishing content deemed likely to trigger the censorship algorithms. Coverage of important issues like pornography, child abuse, LGBT issues, eating disorders, depression, suicide, domestic violence, drug use and sexual health advice will be forced out of mainstream coverage, and made virtually inaccessible to anyone whose family has enabled web censorship in their home.Another factor to consider is that any website which allows user interactions will be in danger of suffering web censorship if they don't carefully moderate and delete any comments or links posted on their site that may trigger the algorithms. Probably the safest way to ensure that no such thing happens would be for websites to not only self censor the content of the site, but to remove the possibility of user interaction entirely.

Larger commercial websites will probably have greater recourse to appeal against being blacklisted, given that they will employ teams of web traffic analysts, who will be able to determine whether the site is being blocked by particular ISPs and legal teams to confront ISPs and prepare legal actions, but smaller commercial websites and independent non-commercial sites will just have to suffer, probably without even knowing they've been found guilty without trial and blacklisted, resulting in severe erosion of their readership or commercial revenues.

David Cameron's Internet firewall will silence countless independent websites and harm the commercial revenues of many legitimate businesses. It will drive coverage of certain legitimate issues off the Internet, and also drive website owners to shut down the freedom to comment on their content.

Not only will Cameron's firewall directly censor the Internet, it will also lead to indirect censorship as people take self-censorship measures out of fear of being silenced entirely by Cameron's Internet firewall regime.

It is probable that small websites like mine will be censored by the firewall because I have occasionally chosen to write about issues such as pornography, terrorism and drugs (see the list of "bad words" I used in the blacklisting section of this very article). Because I have a life outside of my social activism I barely find enough time in the day to even write and publicise my work, let alone devote countless hours to scouring my traffic stats to figure out whether my work is being blocked by a Tory state censorship regime and attempting to mount legal appeals.

Freedom of speech

Unlike citizens of the United States, the British public have no national constitutional guarantees of their freedom of speech. If access to an American website were blocked under instruction from the American government for nothing more than triggering an automatic keyword algorithm, the owner of the website would be able to claim a breach of their constitutional right to free speech had occurred and seek legal redress.

The closest thing the UK has to a constitutional right to freedom of expression is Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, but there are so many get-out clauses written into this legislation that it is rendered virtually meaningless. Even it were applicable, the Conservatives are absolutely determined to scrap the Human Rights Act and become the first country ever to withdraw from the ECHR, presumably so that there are fewer legal challenges to mad Tory policies such as Cameron's Internet censorship firewall, secret courts, private sector justice, retroactively applied laws and the Internet snooper's charter.

It seems unlikely, even if small, independent bloggers like myself found out that their website was being censored by the Cameron Internet firewall regime, that they would have any recourse to the courts to challenge the state mandated censorship of their work.

Denial of Service

One interesting area to consider is how the UK state deals with other groups that attempt to block access to web content. One of the strategies employed by activist groups such as Anonymous is called a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS). These attacks are used to block access to a target website by flooding it with millions of fake requests for information.

The UK government has essentially classified this kind of protest strategy as "economic terrorism" and outlawed the practice, setting a maximum penalty of 10 years imprisonment for individuals that are involved in launching DDoS attacks.

The introduction of David Cameron's Internet censorship regime will leave us in the ludicrous situation where an individual could face 10 years in jail for attempting to temporarily block access to criminal organisations like HSBC or Barclays, whilst the government actually forces ISPs to introduce web filtering firewalls to permanently block access to countless perfectly legal websites.

Conclusion

Even if we naively assume that David Cameron's opt-out "parental controls" have not been designed as a Trojan Horse to implement mass web censorship and surveillance in order to crush political dissent, it is undeniably going to result in the accidental censorship of countless websites (commercial and non-profit alike) that trigger the "bad word" algorithms used in the kind of web censorship technology David Cameron champions.

Due to lack of oversight and accountability, the grounds for legal recourse for commercial losses or freedom of speech violations will be marginal.

The existence of a national web censorship regime, won't just result in the explicit censorship of perfectly legal material, it will also lead to a massive rise in self-censorship as website owners refuse to discuss certain topics, and shut down their forums out of fear of triggering the censorship algo-bots.

The potential for abuse of the system by the secret services, their private contractors, other government agencies and the private ISP companies (that will be given free reign to administer their own web-censorship regimes) is enormous.

The hypocrisy of the government mandating ISPs to permanently block access to perfectly legal material, whilst threatening individuals that may attempt to temporarily block access to criminal organisations with up to 10 years imprisonment couldn't be clearer.

All the while Cameron's "protect the innocence of childhood" pseudo-justification for the introduction of a vast web surveillance and censorship operation will be glaringly invalidated on a daily basis by the continued existence of stuff like Page 3 of the S*n, government jobs websites offering lap-dancing work to under-18s, the Daily Mail "sidebar of smut" and Number 1 smash hit songs about inflicting brutal anal abuse.

What you can do ...

The petition on the government website needs 100,000 signatures to force apolitical debate on the issue. If you are opposed to David Cameron's "firewall" please sign it and share it as widely as you are able.

The petition

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