Why the Lib-Dems have got to stop living in denial

In the aftermath of the catastrophic Liberal Democrat wipeout at the 2015 General Election (that everyone saw coming apart from them) I've seen many comments from shell-shocked Lib-Dem supporters and deposed Lib-Dem politicians. There are three recurring themes to these comments, all of which are wrongheaded, and if persisted with, a severe impediment to the recovery of the party that I'm sure that they all want to actually see happen.

In the wake of having the number of Liberal Democrat seats in Westminster reduced from 57 to just 8 out of the 650, the three main themes put forward by Lib-Dems are as follows.

1.  "I'm sticking by what we did. Going into government with the Tories was the right thing to do."

2.  "Just you wait and see. Things are going to get a whole lot worse now, then you'll miss us."

3.  "The 2015 General Election result was a terrible defeat for liberalism in the UK."

I'm going to run through these themes one at a time explaining what is so wrong about them.

"Going into government with the Tories was the right thing to do"

This thought is like a mantra that Lib-Dems keep endlessly repeating to themselves and to each other, even though it's completely obvious to everyone else outside the Lib-Dem bubble that it isn't true at all.

The evisceration of the Liberal Democrats in election after election since they signed their pact with the Tories in 2010 would tend to indicate that the general public think that they were wrong to do it. The fact that they've lost almost two in three of their voters since the last election indicates that even most of the people who are sympathetic to the Liberal Democrats think that they were wrong to do it.

The desertion of support from the party and the absolute hammerings they've taken in various elections indicate that what the Lib-Dems are saying when they repeat their mantra about having been unfairly punished for having done the right thing, is that "we are right and the public are wrong".

I'd suggest that taking a "we are right and the public are wrong" stance is hardly a great strategy for winning back public support, and neither is the playing the victim card when there is still an awful lot of public anger about what you've done.

I'd suggest that a "we're sorry, we made a big mistake and we want to atone for it" might play a lot better with the public than telling the public how wrong they are and playing the victim card. Maybe the next Lib-Dem leader will be smart enough to realise this and try to change the Lib-Dem message, but probably they won't and we'll have to listen to them talk themselves deeper and deeper into their political graves for the next five years.

"Just you wait and see"

One of the problems with this "just you wait and see" stance is that anyone who has actually been watching for the last five years will have seen plenty of Lib-Dem politicians voting for all kinds of rotten legislation (see next section), and is nowhere near as convinced that they did as much to constrain the Tories as the Lib-Dems are themselves.

Another huge problem with this "just you wait and see" stance is that it's very unlikely that the Tories would be in such a powerful position to impose their extremist ideology had the Liberal Democrats not been so strategically inept and enabled the Tories in the first place. I mean, where did all of the extra Tory seats that gave the Tories a majority in 2015 come from? Almost all of them were taken from the Liberal Democrats, that's where.

In order to understand the strategic ineptitude of the Liberal Democrats we have to look back to the situation in 2010. An unpopular Tory party had somehow failed to win a majority, even though they were standing against an unpopular government led by an unpopular man that had been in power during the worst financial sector meltdown in history. The Lib-Dems had done alright in terms of the vote share, and lots of progressive people still had the "I agree with Nick" factor clear in their minds.

The Lib-Dems made the awful mistake of going into the coalition negotiations from a weak debating position (we've got fewer seats than you so we'll agree to most of your terms) instead of taking a strong debating stance (you need us more than we need you) and drawing a number of red lines (some suggestions listed below), without which no coalition agreement would be signed. Some of these red lines should have included:

1. Right of recall for corrupt MPs (a very popular policy when the expenses scandal was still fresh in people's minds)
2. A proper referendum on voting reform (a referendum between two new voting systems, not one between a "miserable little compromise" and maintaining the status quo)
3. Democratisation of the unelected House of Lords (featuring a public consultation on what is wanted instead)
4. No increases in tuition fees (to do so after making a high profile pledge not to would be political suicide)
5. Increasing the basic income tax threshold (a very popular policy evidenced by the way the Tories stole it and paraded it about as if it were their own)
6. Establishment of the infrastructure investment bank detailed in the Lib Dem manifesto (this would have acted as a bulwark against George Osborne's ideological austerity agenda).

Had the Liberal Democrats held out on these red line issues, the Tories would have either have had to agree and we'd be looking at a completely different political landscape right now, or they would have had to refuse and opt to work as a weak minority government (which would also have been good for the Lib-Dems and good for the progressive agenda).

It's obvious that the progressive agenda would have benefited if the red lines had been agreed to, but even if they hadn't and the Tories had opted for minority rule (under some kind of confidence and supply deal with the Lib-Dems), the Lib-Dems could have gleefully shot down every rotten and unpopular piece of Tory legislation (such as Caroline Spelman's attempt to sell off our public forests) until the next election was called.

The Lib-Dem narrative at the next election (whenever it would have been called) would have been a very strong one indeed, meaning they could conceivably have significantly increased their share of the vote at the next election rather than getting almost completely wiped out as they did in 2015.

Their stance should have been "we wanted to form a stable coalition with the Conservatives for the good of the country, but they refused our offer because they want corrupt MPs to remain untouchable, they want the House of Lords to remain undemocratic, and they want to keep the outdated and unrepresentative Westminster voting system because it works so heavily in their own favour ... We wanted to put the interests of the country first but the Tories refused to work with us because they wanted to defend corruption, the old establishment order, undemocratic practices and an apathy inducing voting system that is rigged in their favour" and so on ...

If the Lib-Dems hadn't been so strategically inept, the Tories wouldn't have been able to spend the last five years laying the groundwork for what is to come next, and it's by no means certain that they would even have been in power at all. Imagine if the Lib-Dems and Labour had called a vote of no confidence in the Tory government when the economy was flatlining as a result of harsh ideological austerity in 2012 (around the time George Osborne was being booed at the Paralympics). Anyone who imagines that the Tories would have won a majority government at that point must be living in a fantasy world.

The "just you wait and see" attitude is completely ridiculous because without the Lib-Dems' strategically inept decision to bind themselves into a five year government with the Tories, there's absolutely no guarantee that the Tories would even actually have a majority government now anyway.

"A terrible defeat for liberalism"

As someone with strong liberal principles I find this Lib-Dem attitude especially irksome.The reason being that after five years of propping up a right-wing authoritarian Tory government, I think the Lib-Dems have lost all right to even call themselves liberals, let alone speak as if they represent some kind of unique voice of liberalism in this country.

As a liberally minded person, each time I saw the introduction draconian right-wing authoritarian legislation by the coalition government, with the support of Lib-Dem votes, I saw it as a defeat for liberalism.

• When Lib-Dem MPs voted in favour of the introduction of secret courts (where a defendant can have their fate decided in a courtroom they are not allowed to enter, charged with offenses they are not allowed to know, based on evidence that they are not allowed to see) I saw that as a defeat for liberalism.

• When Lib-Dem MPs voted in favour of retroactively rewriting the law to save Iain Duncan Smith's unlawful forced labour schemes (where people are forced to give their labour away for free, often to giant profit making multinational corporations, under threat of absolute destitution via sanctions) I saw that as a defeat for liberalism.

• When Lib-Dem MPs voted in favour of allowing the surveillance state to continue mass trawling the private communications data of millions of innocent people with complete impunity, I saw that as a defeat for liberalism.

• When Lib-Dem MPs voted in favour of the introduction of "Bedroom Tax" (which financially penalises low income families no matter whether there are any smaller properties in their area to move into or not) I saw that as a defeat for liberalism.

• When Lib-Dem MPs refused to take action to prevent Iain Duncan Smith from continuing his unlawful treatment of the mentally disabled, I saw that as a defeat for liberalism.

• When Lib-Dem MPs voted in favour of the introduction of harsh and arbitrary new immigration rules that openly discriminate against British families I saw that as a defeat for liberalism.

• When Lib-Dem MPs voted in favour of the introduction of the "Gagging Law" (designed to prevent criticism of government policy by charities and voluntary organisations) I saw that as a defeat for liberalism.

The idea that after all of this, the Liberal Democrats are still self-righteously thinking of themselves some kind of unique "voice of liberalism in the UK" makes me absolutely furious. What right have they got to think of themselves as liberals after all of that? What right do they even have to include the word "Liberal" in the name of their party after all of that? No defenders of liberalism would ever have voted in favour of any of that, and to continue to sanctimoniously cast themselves as "the defenders of liberalism" is to spit in the eye of all genuine liberals.

Conclusion

I have established my objections to the delusional, self-pitying and sanctimonious narratives emanating from within the Lib-Dem bubble. I haven't pointed these things out because of a tribalistic hatred of the Lib-Dems. Far from it. I have a great deal of sympathy for the dozens of hard working Lib-Dem MPs, MSPs and MEPs to have paid with their political careers for Nick Clegg's strategic ineptitude, and for the thousands of Lib-Dem councilors up and down the country to have suffered the severe public backlash against it too.

I say these things because I sincerely believe that without a significant change of tone from the Liberal Democrats (to "we're sorry, we made lots of mistakes, we acknowledge them and we want to learn from them and make amends for them"), then they're only ever going to suffer even more severe backlashes from a public sick of being told that they were wrong and the Lib-Dems were right, how the Lib-Dems are actually the innocent victims in all of this, and a load of sanctimonious rubbish about how the Lib-Dems are the only legitimate voice of liberalism in this country.

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What Brooks Newmark's comments about charities tell us about the Tory mentality

I know that saying "I told you so" is hardly a dignified thing to do, sometimes it's just impossible not to.

When the Tories first tabled thierhe so-called "Transparency of Lobbying, Non-party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill" many were quick to point out that the bill actually exempts the vast majority of corporate lobbying organisations from any kind of scrutiny at all, and that the second part of the bill looked as if it had been specifically designed to censor charities, community groups, protest campaigns, trade unions and religious organisations. Hence the TOLNPCATUA bill soon became known as "The Gagging Bill".

I was one of the many independent journalists to speak out about this rotten piece of legislation, and I wasn't alone. The campaign group 38 Degrees ran a high profile campaign against it, The National Council For Voluntary Organisations and hundreds of other charities spoke out against it, the Trade Union Congress condemned it, and even the Electoral Commission (the body responsible for policing these draconian new censorship rules) warned that the Gagging Bill would undermine freedom of speech.

The Tory party and the bulk of the mainstream press ignored all of these concerns, or glibly dismissed them as conspiracy theorising. Leading Tories were wheeled out to repeatedly assure us that the TOLNPCATUA bill was not a "Gagging Bill" and that they had no intention of censoring charities. Here's are a few examples of these repeated Tory assurances that the bill was not designed to silence charities and voluntary organisations:

"We’re not setting out in any sense to constrain any charity or organisation who wants to campaign on policy issues" Andrew Lansley [source]

"It was never our intention to prevent anyone from conducting their normal range of charitable and policy-based activity" Andrew Lansley [source]

"The legislation will not affect the majority of charities and other campaigning organisations." David Cameron [source]

It's worth noting that David Cameron is the man who promised that the NHS would be safe in his hands, and that there would be "no more top-down reorganisations of the NHS", and that Andrew Lansley was the man who was drawing up the secret plan to launch the biggest top-down reorganisation of the NHS whilst Cameron was making all of those misleading pre-election promises about his intentions towards the NHS.

In December 2013 I wrote an article highlighting the implications of Iain Duncan Smith's furious tirade against the Trussell Trust, in which he whinged bitterly about their efforts to prove a causal link between his welfare reforms and the exponential rise in food bank dependency. The manner in which Iain Duncan Smith ranted at the Trussell Trust about how they should keep out of politics made it absolutely clear that the Tories hate the idea of being held to account by charities and voluntary organisations, and strongly suggested that the motivation behind the TOLNPCATUA bill was, as so many people were claiming, the desire to force charities and voluntary organisations out of the political sphere.
    Despite the numerous complaints against the bill, and the campaigns against it, it was passed into law in January 2014.

It just goes to show how much contempt the Tories have for the public that within eight months of the Gagging Bill being passed into law, David Cameron's new charities minister Brooks Newmark stated that:

"We really want to try and keep charities and voluntary groups out of the realms of politics ... the important thing charities should be doing is sticking to their knitting"

So after all of those assurances that they had no plans to prevent charities and voluntary organisations from holding politicians to account, their own charities minister openly admits that this is exactly what he considers his job to be.

Brooks Newmark's statement about keeping charities and voluntary organisations out of politics was that undeniable "I told you" moment, but I got no sense of satisfaction from it, because in order to have correctly predicted that something bad was going to happen, something bad must have happened.

Brooks Newmark's views on his role as charities minister reveals the underlying Tory hatred of the idea of being held to account by voluntary organisations. These people clearly believe that politics is solely for career politicians like them, and for the private interests that want to continue lobbying them in secrecy. They don't want "the lower orders" to have any involvement in politics at all other than turning up once every five years to put a cross next to the least bad option on the ballot paper.

This Tory conception that politics is for the privileged elite, and that ordinary people and voluntary organisations should be prevented from participation just goes to show how afraid they are. If the elite running politics, and the plebs not worrying their pretty little heads over serious things was the natural order of the universe, then there would have been no need for the Gagging Bill, and Brooks Newmark would never have spelled out the Tory duty to keep ordinary people "out of the realms of politics".

The privileged Tory minority are right to be afraid. They know that we massively outnumber them, and that if we stood in solidarity against their greed, their corruption and their outright malice against the most vulnerable in society, we could easily consign them to the dustbin of history.

Only time will tell if the ordinary people of the UK have the sense and the strength of purpose to come together and overthrow the corrupt establishment minority, or whether decades of exposure to right-wing media has turned us into a nation of docile and compliant halfwits, who are more likely to get upset about "scroungers" and immigrants at the bottom of society than the corrupt establishment minority at the top.

 Another Angry Voice  is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only sources of income for  Another Angry Voice  are small donations from people who see some value in my work. 

If you appreciate my efforts and you could afford to make a donation, 

it would be massively appreciated.

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The farcical Tory Great War centenary celebrations

From the beginning the Tory plan to celebrate the centenary of the United Kingdom joining the First World War looked like a distasteful effort to rinse some nationalist capital out of a hideous conflict. There are many, myself included, who have grave reservations about this Tory effort to rebrand the Great War as some kind of heroic patriotic adventure to be celebrated, rather than a barbaric exercise in mechanised slaughter and hellish living conditions to serve as a warning to subsequent generations of the horrors of war.

The most widely reported example of this Tory attempt to rewrite history was Michael Gove´s bizarre rant about the BBC comedy series Blackadder Goes Fourth. Laughably, Gove came across as a man completely unaware that the "lions led by donkeys" narrative he was decrying as some kind of leftist plot to undermine Britain was actually devised by the historian turned Tory party bigwig Alan Clarke in his 1961 book "The Donkeys"!

Another illustration of this weird Tory effort to glorify and reinvent the First World War as some kind of heroic adventure can be seen in the vacuous tribute David Cameron was allowed to write on the wreath he laid at the Cenotaph.

"The most enduring legacy is our liberty" is an extremely poorly worded tribute because it clearly applies far more effectively to the Second World War than it does the First. Of course it is a matter of opinion what "the most enduring legacy" from such a horrific conflict might be, however, I´m pretty sure that most would agree that the practice of remembrance is a much more tangible and enduring legacy than the general concept of "liberty", especially given that Cameron and his rotten government have striven relentlessly to undermine "liberty" with grotesque totalitarian and anti-democratic legislation such as the "secret courts" bill, retroactive workfare sanctions, the "Gagging Law" and the "DRIP spooks charter".

One of the most disgusting aspects of all was the farcical efforts by the Tory party and the right-wing press to smear Ed Miliband as unpatriotic for having laid a pre-written wreath, whilst praising Cameron for having personally written his own weirdly inappropriate tribute.

The Tory press were so quick to whip themselves up into a frenzy of condemnation over Miliband´s supposed lack of respect, that they completely failed to spot that the wreaths laid by Nick Clegg, and the political leaders of Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland were all written in identical handwriting to the one laid by Ed Miliband.

After the cursory investigation that the baying right-wing mob failed to do for themselves in their haste to launch their tirades of faux outrage, it turned out that David Cameron was the only politician who was even allowed to personalise his message, the others were just handed their pre-written wreaths and denied the opportunity to write their own tributes by the organisers of the event, who were the Department of Culture Media and Sport, which is headed by the Tory MP Sajid Javid.

For a Tory run department to decide that the only political figure who should be allowed to personalise their tribute must be the Tory Prime Minister, whilst all of his political rivals just had to lay a wreath bearing a pre-written laminated description of their job was a brazen display of political tribalism, but for the Tories and the right-wing press to then lambast Miliband for falling into the trap the Department of Culture Media and Sport had set for him was just farcical.

After the truth came out, that Ed Miliband and all of Cameron´s political rivals had been denied the opportunity to personalise their messages, some of the right-wing backtracking was absolutely comical. Right-wingers tried to claim that Miliband should have quickly attempted to write/scratch his own personal message on top of the laminated card, or even that he should have foreseen the whole episode and brought his own wreath! Had Miliband actually done either of these things it´s not difficult to imagine the tide of Tory outrage. He´d have been accused of deliberately defacing the tribute had he tried to write over the laminated card, orhe´d have been accused of deliberately ruining the occasion with an absurd display of oneupmanship by bringing a better wreath just to show up his political rivals.

Thanks to the blatant political bias of the Department of Culture Media and Sport and the rabid reaction of the right-wing press, a day of solemn remembrance has been reduced to farcical bickering and sub-juvenile political points scoring about what had been written on laminated bits of paper.

100 years to the day after the United Kingdom entered what was to become a gruesome bloodbath of a war (or a wonderful patriotic boys-own adventure - as the Tory revisionists would have us believe) this historical moment was commemorated with an ugly display of manufactured Tory outrage.

All we are left with after this farce is the hope that whoever is in power for the proper Great War centenary in November 2018 is capable of arranging a much more solemn and serious occasion.


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

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Why I chose to self-censor after legalistic threats from UKIP

Everyone familiar with my work knows that I have a very strong anti-censorship policy. I allow everyone to have their say on the Another Angry Voice Facebook page, and very rarely resort to deleting things. The reason I allow everyone to have their say, even though I might strongly disagree with them, is that I don't want Another Angry Voice to become a closed ideology echo-chamber like so many other political pages on Facebook.

In my view it is a far better strategy to engage in debate and win the argument, than it is to simply delete disagreeable comments and ban anyone who dares offer differing opinions (as UKIP, other political parties and numerous high profile politicians routinely do on their social media pages).

On the extremely rare occasions that I do decide to delete things or ban people from my page*, I inform the community of what I've done and explain exactly why I've done it. I keep everyone informed like this in order to maintain complete transparency.

On the evening of 12 May 2014 I committed my first (and hopefully only) act of mass censorship by removing an image from my feed which had been liked, shared and commented on by well over 10,000 people. I took the decision to remove it after having received legalistic threats from a UKIP candidate. The image I removed was the anchor for thousands of conversations which have now been destroyed. It is rather ironic that a large percentage of the comments that were deleted as a consequence of this UKIP demand were actually sympathetic towards UKIP.

Unlike the vast majority of images I share on my page, the image I removed was one I had borrowed from elsewhere, rather than one I'd designed myself. It was used to illustrate a comment about the widely reported story of how a UKIP candidate had set the police on one of their political opponents in order to intimidate him into removing some perfectly legal posts from Twitter, even though the police had absolutely no legal right to ask him to do so.
 
The precise nature of the complaint made against me was that I had infringed UKIP's copyright because the picture I had shared included their logo. The UKIP candidate stated that he had reported my page to Facebook and that he had brought my page to the attention of UKIP head office.
 
In my view it's highly ironic that another UKIP politician has now come along to make legalistic threats towards me in order to get me to remove my post highlighting the other UKIP politician's attempts to stifle the freedom of speech of another one of their political opponents. It feels like an act of meta-censorship to rival any celebrity super-injunction imposed in the UK libel courts.
 
Many people have expressed their disappointment that I "caved in", but in my defence I have worked tirelessly for over three years to get to the point where I can reach out to literally millions of people per week with my work, and I simply can't face the possibility of losing this power to speak out and be heard if my page is shut down over some stupid spat with UKIP over a single image that I didn't even design myself.

Even though it is absolutely clear that UKIP would have been laughed out of court had they attempted to use the legal process to force me into this act of censorship, I still decided to go ahead and delete the image because any decisions made over this case wouldn't have been made in a British court of law, they would have been made unilaterally and arbitrarily by Facebook. The reality of the situation is that Facebook don't need the approval of a British judge and/or jury in order to shut down my page, they can pretty much do whatever they like on their own website (check their terms and conditions).
 
One of the main factors that helped make my decision to remove the image is the fact that both the image and the censorship story I was using it to highlight are all over social media. Using legalistic threats in order to get one statement about their attempts to curtail free speech taken down, doesn't men that the criticism will go away, in fact it's more than likely to increase the number of people using social media to talk about the way UKIP use threats in order to stifle criticism of their party.

It is worth noting that none of the other political parties I've criticised have ever attempted to curtail my freedom of speech by demanding that I remove images about their parties, countless of which contain versions of their political logos. This is despite the fact that I've produced and shared far more pictures criticising the Tories, Labour and the Liberal Democrats than I ever have about UKIP. Please don't take this observation as any kind of endorsement of the Westminster establishment parties, I'm very clear about the fact that I strongly oppose all of the parties that subscribe to the neoliberal ideology, and suggest that people seriously consider voting alternative in the Euro elections.

I have decided not to name the UKIP candidate because I don't want to allow the remotest possibility of a personal witch hunt against this person. I'd rather any anger at this effort to curtail my freedom of speech was aimed at the UKIP leadership for having allowed their candidates to go around attempting to silence their political opponents. After the appalling negative publicity generated as a result of the police being called in to intimidate one of their political opponents just a few days previously, one would have expected any sensible political party to take measures to prevent any kind of repeat performance. Clearly the UKIP leadership failed in this regard, which reflects as badly on the internal organisation of their party as it does on their attitude towards protecting the freedom of speech of people they don't necessarily agree with.

A screenshot of the Facebook post that has now been deleted.

This incident will not prevent me from continuing to criticise UKIP. In fact it has made me even more certain that this extreme-right party represents a grave threat to what remains of our democracy and our freedoms after 35 long years of neoliberal ideology. If they're prepared to make threats like these to curtail our freedom of speech when they have no real political power, it's easy to assume that they would come up with something a lot more draconian than the (already deeply disturbing) Gagging Law, should the nightmare scenario happen and we end up with a Tory-UKIP coalition in 2015.

In conclusion I'd like to apologise again for having censored so many conversations at the behest of UKIP. I feel extremely uneasy about what I've done, and I have found it difficult to read all of the messages chastising me as a coward for having given in to this kind of intimidation. I find myself hoping that having "caved in" like this won't have done too much damage to my reputation as a man who stands up for what he believes in.

 
 Another Angry Voice  is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only source of revenue for  Another Angry Voice  is the  PayPal  donations box. If you could afford to make a donation to help keep this site going, it would be massively appreciated.

* I've only ever banned 9 people (for doing stuff like calling for ethnic genocide against Arabs, repeatedly bullying other users, ignoring countless requests to stop spamming, and making extraordinarily slanderous accusations of paedophilia), which is very low considering I now have over 55,000 followers, and my content attracts well over 10,000 comments per week.

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David Cameron's contempt for free speech

In November 2012 David Cameron bragged to parliament about how much the people of Britain can be be proud of: "the oldest democracy in the world; freedom of speech; a free press; frank and healthy public debate". In the same speech he expressed concerns about infringing on the freedom of the press. Here's exactly what he said:

"We should be wary of any legislation that has the potential to infringe free speech and a free press. In this House, which has been a bulwark of democracy for centuries, we should think very, very carefully before crossing that line." [Hansard]

Now, you don't have to be any kind of politics obsessive to know that when David Cameron says something, you should immediately begin reading between the lines to see where the lies are. His track record is absolutely clear.

• Cameron said "We'll cut the deficit, not the NHS" then launched a £20 billion programme of cuts to the NHS.
• Cameron said "no more top-down reorganisations of the NHS" then launched the biggest top-down reorganisation in the entire history of the NHS.
• Cameron claimed that "We're paying down Britain's debts" even though the national debt is still growing rapidly.
• Cameron claimed that the OBR had stated that austerity is not responsible for depressed economic growth, when they had actually admitted that austerity was almost entirely responsible.
• Cameron said that the government are "making work pay" but the average wage has fallen in real terms every single month since he came to power.
• Cameron said that fracking would substantially reduce gas prices in the UK but even George Osborne admits that this is a misleading fiction.

In light of this track record, it is probably wise to start from the default position that when David Cameron says something, assume that the opposite to be true.

There have been ample demonstrations that David Cameron's fine words about the importance of "freedom of speech" and "press freedom" are nothing more than hot air. In this article I will briefly outline three of the most apparent.

The Gagging Law
[Main article]

Any government with the slightest regard for "freedom of speech" would certainly not have pushed through legislation designed to limit the freedom of speech of the non-profit sector, but this is precisely what Cameron's government has done.

It is absolutely clear that the "Protection of Corporate Lobbying and Silencing of Legitimate Political Debate" legislation was designed to silence charities, religions, protest groups, community organisations and trade unions from criticising Tory party policy. Iain Duncan Smith's angry rhetoric against the Trussell Trust food bank confirms it.

Despite the protestations of the voluntary sector that the "Gagging Bill" represents a blatant attack on their freedom of expression, and attempts by the House of Lords to unpick some of the most draconian elements of the legislation, the Tories managed to get this abomination of a bill through parliament.

The main ray of hope is that the first prosecutions against the charities/religions/protest groups that dare to ignore these new draconian laws in order to speak out against the government will attract far more attention to their causes than simply letting them alone ever would have.

The "Deregulation" Bill
[Main article]

If the attempt to hide legislation designed to attack the freedom of speech of the non-profit sector in a bill ostensibly aimed at controlling corporate lobbying wasn't sneaky enough, the Tories then tried to hide an attack on the freedom of the press in a so-called "Deregulation Bill".

The "Deregulation Bill" is a hotch-potch of legislation covering ten different government departments which is being rushed through parliament as fast as possible. One of the most contentious parts of the bill is Clause 47 which would allow the decision to confiscate journalistic material to take place in secret courts, which is clearly an attack on the "free press".

The Guardian
 [Main article]

The "Gagging Law" and Clause 47 of the "Deregulation" Bill are attacks on our freedom of speech and the freedom of the press, however they are quite obscure legislative efforts to undermine our freedoms. There is absolutely nothing obscure about this next example.

In July 2013 David Cameron and his goons threatened to shut down the Guardian newspaper and imprison their journalists over the Edward Snowden leaks. Within the space of eight months Cameron had gone from lauding the "free press" and worrying about "crossing the Rubicon" of press censorship, to threatening to shut down one of the most famous newspapers in Britain unless they complied with his demands.

It doesn't matter what your views on the Guardian (leftist drivel, a good newspaper or sold-out to neoliberalism long ago), the decision to send his deputy security advisor to threaten to shut them down demonstrates that all Cameron's noble words about "freedom of speech" and the "free press" were just vapid hot air.

Conclusion

If we judge David Cameron by his actions rather than by the noble words about "freedom of speech" and the "free press" that he used in Parliament in November 2012, it is absolutely clear that he has an attitude to press freedom more befitting a tyrannical leader of North Korea than the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

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ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE
    
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The "Deregulation" bill
                  
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