The Tories and DUP are plotting to use Brexit as an excuse to tamper with democracy in Scotland and Wales.

Remember when the Brexit campaigners told us all that voting Leave would give the Tory party (and their uber-nationalist DUP mates) the pability to amend the powers of the Scottish parliament and the Welsh Assembly with no democratic oversight of their actions whatever?

No. Me neither.

Well on the evening of December 12th 2017 the Tories and their DUP backers/puppet-masters joined forces to defeat Amendment 158 to the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill by 315 votes to 291.

Amendment 158 sought to prevent the Westminster government from misusing the powers they were awarding themselves to amend EU derived laws in order to undermine the powers of the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly.

This safeguard is vitally important because there are plenty in the Tory and DUP ranks who would dearly love to restrict the power of the devolved parliaments, if not scrap them altogether. 

All 13 of the Tory MPs representing Scottish seats voted with the government to let them keep the power to alter or revoke devolved powers from their own national parliament without any parliamentary scrutiny of what they are actually up to!

Unless you follow SNP or Plaid Cymru politicians on Twitter you will have heard very little about this vote because the mainstream media have decided to completely ignore it.

Ignoring such a significant constitutional matter is bizarre enough in its own right, but this media silence is quite simply extraordinary given that this contentious vote occurred on the very same day that the entire corporate mainstream media erupted in an explosion of anti-Facebook fury over weeks old comments from a disgruntled former Facebook employee!

The corporate media will go into a frenzy of churnalism over ex-employee attacks former employer comments from weeks ago, but not one of them will even bother to explain the details of the Brexit legislation the Tories are currently ramming through parliament with the support of their fanatical DUP backers/puppet-masters?

If we look back to the whole debacle over English Votes for English Laws, the hypocrisy of the Tory party is truly revealed. They voted to ban Scottish Westminster MPs from voting on anything they define as an "English law", but when it comes to Brexit, they've voted to allow English government ministers to use Brexit as an excuse to redefine or even scrap the powers of the Scottish parliament!

Of course a significant percentage of Brexit voters were the kind of hard-right tabloid-addled little Englanders who actually take Nigel Farage's ravings seriously, but a hefty percentage never were.

However it should be obvious to all by now that Brexit is being dictated by the hard-right fringe of the Tory party, and you couldn't really get a more callous and opportunistic bunch than that lot. If they see an opportunity to use Brexit as an excuse to reduce the political power of Scottish and Welsh voters then of course they're going to try to take it.

Even if Brexit wasn't solely an exercise in anti-democratic Little Englanderism before the referendum result came in, this vote to scrap Amendment 158 shows that it certainly is now.

The Tories are already determined to use Brexit as an excuse to rewrite thousands of UK laws with no democratic scrutiny whatever, and their vote against Amendment 158 is proof that they're keen on rewriting the laws that established and defined the devolved Scottish and Welsh parliaments, and doing that without any democratic scrutiny too.

The direction of travel is absolutely obvious, and anyone (regardless of their views on the EU) who continues to support the profoundly anti-democratic and increasingly British-nationalist approach the Tories are taking to Brexit surely forfeits their right to consider themselves a supporter of democracy.

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Theresa May's first Queen's speech was a total shambles

Theresa May's first, and almost certainly last, Queen's speech was every bit the shambles you would expect from a directionless charlatan with no ideology other than a self-serving desperation to cling onto power at any cost.

The May-DUP deal

Theresa May delayed the Queen's speech in order to buy herself time to make a deal with the DUP. The Tories then failed to agree a deal with their right-wing ideological blood brothers, and then the speech went ahead without the deal in place.

I'm not going to walk you down the garden path to conclusions about Theresa May's competence and deal-making abilities. Just think about it for yourself.

Even if this May-DUP deal does go ahead before the Queen's speech is voted on, it will clearly be a demonstration that Theresa May is willing to sling literally anything on her bonfire of vanity, even peace in Northern Ireland.

Ripping up their own manifesto

One of the most extraordinary aspects of Theresa May's vanity election was the way she wilted under public pressure and began ripping pages out of her own manifesto before the polls had even opened.

She backpedalled furiously on her depraved proposal to impose a 100% stealth inheritance tax for people who get frail in their old age and need social care, and the pledge to provide infant school children breakfast at 6.8p per day was also bunged into the shredder too.

The Queen's speech revealed that both of these Tory policies have gone, as have many others from their manifesto of misery including their plans to scrap the pensioners' triple lock and to means test winter fuel payments, their plot to bring back fox hunting, and their scheme to bring back educational apartheid based on exam results at the age of 11.

Other things that were dropped were promises of 10,000 more mental health nurses (impossible after Theresa May's scrapping of NHS bursaries drove 10,000 trainee nurses out of the profession in a single year), the plan to nick Ed Miliband's energy price cap idea, and the plan to scrap the independent Serious Fraud Office in order to give the Tory government control over financial corruption cases.

Making it up as they go along

The way the British political system usually works is that the parties present their proposed legislative agendas in their manifestos, the people vote, and then the party with the most seats outlines their legislative agenda in the Queen's speech.

By ditching so many policies from their manifesto for their pared-back Queen's speech, the Tories are signalling their intent to just make it all up as they go along for as long as they can cling onto power.

What is the point of parties bothering to write manifestos at all if they just sling them in the bin after they get elected and then do whatever the hell they want to?

Any MP who votes in favour of Theresa May's Queen's speech will be demonstrating their intent to allow Theresa May and the Tories to simply make things up as they go along.

The Brexit U-turn

Theresa May has been warned in no uncertain terms by dozens of her Europhile Tory backbenchers that an economically ruinous "no deal" Brexit strop is now out of the question

As a result of this internal Tory rebellion the Queen's speech makes absolutely no mention whatever of her diplomatically inept "no deal is better than a bad deal" threat to explode an economic bomb over Britain and the EU if she doesn't get her own way, and all we get instead is a platitude about making a success of Brexit.

Theresa May is now dancing to the tune of her backbenchers, but the Tory party is brutally divided between hard Brexit fanatics like Iain Duncan Smith, Michael Gove and John Redwood, and the Europhile MPs.

If Theresa May manages to get her Queen's speech through then it's going to be fascinating to see the absurd political contortions she is going to have to do in order to satisfy both of these ideologically incompatible factions, both of which will have the power to bring her weak and unstable government to its knees at pretty much any point.

Any MP who votes in favour of Theresa May's Queen's speech will be demonstrating their intent to foist an incredibly weak, unstable and ideologically divided government on the UK.

Attacking Internet freedom 

"A commission for countering extremism will be established to support the government in stamping out extremist ideology in all its forms, both across society and on the internet, so it is denied a safe space to spread."

Theresa May is absolutely fixated on controlling the Internet. She piggybacks this right-wing authoritarian agenda onto every single terrorist attack, even when there's no evidence whatever that the attacks could have been prevented by revoking Internet freedom.

If Theresa May had any real concerns over public safety from terrorism then she would use existing legislation to prosecute the appalling hate speech and glorification of terrorism that goes on in places like the Britain First hate group, and she certainly wouldn't have allowed known jihadists to go completely unwatched as they planed and executed their deadly terrorist attacks.

The real reason Theresa May dislikes Internet freedom is that it allows people to discuss and debate politics outside the narrow spectrum of right-wing opinion that is deemed acceptable by the mainstream media.

She knows that she lost her majority because the Internet is allowing people to break down the right-wing propaganda tropes that have dominated UK political discourse for decades, so she wants to stamp it out and return to the time when fanatical Tory hard-right economic dogma was subjected to virtually no scrutiny whatever. It's an impossible fantasy, but since when have realism and groundedness ever been factors in Theresa May's political calculations before?

Any MP who votes in favour of the Queen's speech will be demonstrating their intent to help Theresa May destroy the freedom of the Internet for her own right-wing authoritarian political purposes.

Attacking democracy

"A bill will be introduced to repeal the European Communities Act and provide certainty for individuals and businesses."

Another horrifying announcement in the Queen's speech is that the Tories are actually intent on continuing with their anti-democratic effort to completely bypass parliament and allow Tory ministers to rewrite the laws of the land as they see fit.

The anti-democratic Tory repeal bill is an absolute affront to democracy. 

Only the most hypocritical of Brexiters could possibly try to argue that Tory ministers rewriting the laws of the land without any parliamentary scrutiny whatever is a price worth paying to end the supposedly anti-democratic influence of the EU.

Either you think parliament should be sovereign, or you think that government ministers should be allowed to make up the law of the land as they go along with no parliamentary scrutiny whatever.

 You simply can't believe both unless you're 100% immune to cognitive dissonance.

Any MP who votes in favour of the Queen's speech will be demonstrating their intent to help Theresa May and the Tories destroy British democracy by rewriting the laws of the land to suit themselves with no democratic scrutiny whatever.

Britain for sale

"My government will work to attract investment in infrastructure to support economic growth"

This particular part of the Queen's speech should leap out to anyone who understands the Tory track record on investment. Since 2010 the Tories have ruthlessly and recklessly cut back on infrastructure and investment meaning that the UK is getting left further and further behind in the global economy.

The UK spends only 1.7% of GDP investing for the future when the average amongst developed nations is around 3%. This deliberate ideologically driven under-investment will have devastating consequences for our future economic prospects.

When the Tories talk about "attracting investment", they don't mean that they're going to invest in the UK economy at all, it means that they're going to go around the world begging countries like Qatar, Oman, the UAE and China into buying our public infrastructure.

In November 2016 Theresa May's government handed our publicly owned aviation fuel distribution network directly to the governments of Oman and the UAE. In March 2017 the Tories handed the Southwestern rail franchise to the government of Hong Kong, and later in March 2017 Theresa May begged and grovelled in front of the Qataris for them to buy up even more British infrastructure.

Any MP who votes in favour of the Queen's speech will be demonstrating their intent to help Theresa May and the Tories requisition even more publicly owned British infrastructure and services to distribute to foreign governments.

An authoritarian with no authority

Theresa May's vanity election has reduced her to the ridiculous position of being a savage right-wing authoritarian with no authority.

Even if the DUP decide to put their own party interests above the interests of the United Kingdom by voting through Theresa May's economically treasonous, Internet freedom-attacking, democracy-hating Queen's speech, she'll still be left in an incredibly weak position where she will have to dance to the whims of her bitterly divided Tory backbenchers to keep them in line, and every move she makes will be subject to approval by the DUP.

Any politician with any regard for the best interests of the United Kingdom would not vote in favour of Theresa May's shambolic Queen's speech, but then the Tories will always put their own party political interests above the interests of the nation as a whole, meaning it's only the DUP who have the power to prevent Theresa May from forming a government that is both full of malicious intent, but also so weak and unstable they'll be completely unable to run the country or the Brexit negotiations effectively.

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The Tory election poster that accidentally tells you the truth

The uncropped version of this poster is like something from the 1970s. It fearmongers about Labour delivering "a tax bombshell for your family", which someone has helpfully cropped to make it read "hell for your family", which is what you're very likely to get under a Tory government.

Hell for your family

After they came to power in 2010 the Tories oversaw the longest sustained decline in workers' wages in recorded history, meaning that the real value of wages today are still 10.4% below their value in 2007.

Not just a lost decade of wage growth. A decade of negative wage growth.

If you work for a living then the Tories will make things worse as they try to squeeze wages as hard as possible to achieve their dream of competing with China and India on their way up as we pass them on our way down.

If you have kids at school, care about safe policing levels on your streets, want a decent well-funded fire service or an NHS that isn't collapsing from the exhaustion of £billions of ideologically driven Tory cuts, then you'd be a fool to vote Tory too, because their cuts could mean hell for your family in the case of poor education, crime, house fire or illness.

Debt

Surely you know that the Tories have created more new public debt since 2010 than every single Labour government in history combined?

Surely you know that?

Taxes

Only a party as deceptive and disingenuous as the Tories could print up a poster fearmongering about Labour raising taxes when they themselves are the ones failing to rule out tax rises for the poor.

Just look at their record since 2010. Eoin Clarke has helpfully compiled this list of 24 tax rises imposed by the Tories in the last 7 years.

Imagine the kind of gullible half-wit you'd have to be to turn a blind eye to the Tories' proven track record of raising taxes in order to believe Labour are the tax threat because you saw an anti-Labour poster with the word "tax" written on a bomb!

David Davis

The Tory standing in front of the poster is David Davis. Once upon a time he was one of the not-so-bad Tories. The kind who actually seemed to give a stuff about things like civil liberties and the rule of law.

After being beaten to the Tory leadership by the young David Cameron, Davis' gradually surrendered his principles to such a point that he's prepared to stand in front of such a tawdry poster as the Brexit minister in the most right-wing authoritarian UK government in living memory.

10 years ago Davis would have been ashamed to stand in front of such a poster, and he would never have dreamed of trying to introduce an anti-democratic Great Repeal Bill designed to completely bypass democracy and allow his fellow Tory ministers to set about rewriting the laws of the land with no scrutiny over their actions.

A "no deal strop"

David Davis is the one who helped Theresa May come up with her ridiculous threat to strop away from the EU negotiations with nothing if they don't cave into Tory demands.

You don't have to be a genius level diplomat to understand that making the threat of exploding an economic bomb over your neighbours the centrepiece of your strategy before the negotiations have even started is hardly likely to achieve the optimal outcome.

The European Commission President Jean-Claude Junker has said that Theresa May and the Brexiters are so out of touch with the reality that they're facing that the likelihood of a "no deal" Brexit cliff edge will be greater than 50% with them in charge.

If you're worried about the welfare of your family you need to have a good hard think about whether you really want to entrust these Tory charlatans with the nation's future.

Are you prepared for a Tory cliff edge Brexit recession?

The "no deal" cliff edge Brexit strop the Tories are threatening to do would wipe between 6.3% and 9.5% of GDP; we'd face WTO tariffs on imports and exports; the manufacturing industry would be reduced to chaos; 97% of our food and drink exports would be affected; the UK shipping industry would face ruin because of customs checks; Scotland would leave the Union and rejoin the Single Market if they had any sense whatever, the Irish peace process would need settling all over again; millions of migrants (EU citizens in the UK, and UK citizens in the EU) would face ears of uncertainty and turmoil; the British aviation industry would be severely damaged; businesses and capital would flow out of the UK into the safety of the Single Market at an unprecedented rate ...

How could you imagine that this kind of worst case scenario Tory Brexit strop would be good for your family or for the national debt?

Do you remember the banking crisis and the subsequent recession? Was that good for your family? Was that good for the national debt?

Well the post-crisis recession wiped 4.8% off GDP. If the post Tory Brexit recession wipes 7% or 8% off GDP how do you think that will play out?

Maybe you're confident enough in your own financial situation to adopt the "I'm alright Jack" attitude*, but what about your friends, your neighbours, your extended family, your local community. Will they all have the financial means to weather the storm of this self-inflicted chaos?

What about the national debt?

Do you honestly believe that a collapse in GDP that's even bigger than the one after the banking crisis won't lead to the deficit going crazy and the debt getting bigger at a faster rate than it did even after the banks went all haywire and insolvent back in 2007-08?

Conclusion

For goodness sake don't believe Tory propaganda. 

And if you do vote Tory don't dare say you weren't warned when it all turns to chaos.

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* = In which case you're obviously not someone who works in manufacturing, food & services, agriculture, shipping or ports, aviation or airports, the import/export business or tourism, or someone who relies on any publicly funded service, welfare entitlement or pension.

Theresa May's Easter message is delusional nonsense

In her Easter message Theresa May talked about a "sense of coming together" in support of Brexit after the divisions of David Cameron's rushed and extremely toxic EU referendum campaign, but she's totally delusional.

Firstly Brexit is still a hugely divisive issue. Those who voted in favour of it are a minority who are massively outnumbered by those who voted against it, those who didn't vote, and those who were tactically excluded from the vote to give Brexit a better chance of success (16-18 year olds, EU citizens in the UK, UK citizens in the EU). Even if we just count those who were eligible to vote, only 37% of us actually wanted the social and economic ruination of a Tory administered Brexit.

Even a lot of people who thought that Brexit was a good idea in principle must be reacting in horror at the sheer diplomatic incompetence of Theresa May and the three Brexiteers' threat-based "negotiating strategy" and their outrageous anti-democratic machinations.

Then there's the fact that voters of Scotland and Northern Ireland clearly rejected Brexit, meaning that May's talk of the country coming together to unify behind a Tory administered Brexit must sound like insane gibberish in these countries that have only one Tory MP between the pair of them. In fact Theresa May's refusal to engage with the Scottish parliament over Brexit and her right-wing authoritarian "you'll do as you're told" attitude is doing wonders for the prospect of Scottish independence.

Another factor to consider is that under our ridiculously outdated and unrepresentative voting system the Tories managed to win control of the government with support from just 24% of the electorate. That means 76% of the electorate didn't vote for the Tories to be ruling the country even before the Brexit shambles was unleashed. Additionally the Tories fraudulently misdeclared a load of electoral spending in order to financially dope their way to success in a load of marginal constituencies. Perhaps they wouldn't have been in government at all if they hadn't cheated their way into power?

Only 24% of the electorate voted for the Tories to be running the country, but 0% voted for Theresa May to be leading the country into the most complex and risky diplomatic negotiations in history. She wasn't voted for by anyone, she was simply appointed by her fellow Tory MPs, presumably because she does the best Margaret Thatcher impersonation of the lot of them. It can't have been because of her political track record at the Home Office, which was a sickening blend of extreme authoritarianism and outright incompetence.

So we have a ridiculously out-of-touch Prime Minister talking about unity when the UK is so divided it's in imminent danger of actually splitting up, demanding that we all get behind an economically ruinous Brexit that only a minority of people actually voted for, administered by a Tory government that an even smaller minority of people voted for, led by an appointed Prime Minister that nobody voted for.

The weird thing is that some people actually accept this horrendously delusional gibberish at face value.

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"Taking back control" by ... err ...uh oh!

"Let's take back control" was one of the big Brexiter slogans during the toxic and ridiculously rushed EU referendum campaign. We heard it over and over again during the EU referendum debate, but we never got any explanation of what this appealing little sound bite was actually going to mean in practice.

Now that Theresa May's pitiful threat-based "negotiating strategy" has backfired and totally unified the 27 remaining EU states in their resolve to ignore her threats and deny her ridiculous demands that they start negotiating a EU-UK trade deal before she has even guaranteed the rights of EU citizens who live in the UK.

Theresa May's threat to turn the UK into a giant tax haven if the EU don't give her what she wants may have gone down well with the billionaires who own right-wing propaganda tabloids like the Express, Daily Mail and S*n, but it clearly went down incredibly badly with the people she's actually going to have to negotiate with.

The EU are hardly renowned for political unity but Theresa May's threat to deliberately damage the EU by turning Britain into a parasitical low-regulation corporate tax-haven has backfired spectacularly with all 27 member states unanimously agreeing to the proposed EU negotiating stance.

The shadow Brexit minister Keir Starmer absolutely slammed Theresa May for pandering to the fanatical hard-right fringe of the Tory party instead of trying to secure Britain's best interests saying that she "should have spent the last nine months building alliances across Europe, not pandering to those in her cabinet and her party who want to sever all links with the EU and retreat from our closest allies and most important trading partners".

It was always clear that Brexit was going to leave the UK in a very weak diplomatic position, but Theresa May's toddler tantrum of a "negotiating strategy" and her efforts to use the lives of EU citizens in the UK as bargaining chips have made the situation very much worse than they needed to be.

Britain is isolated and belligerently hurling threats around instead of trying to negotiate in a diplomatically competent manner, and the 27 EU states are unified in agreement that the separation deal comes first, that the rights of EU citizens are vital, and that when the EU-UK trade deal happens, it will happen democratically, with every other EU state getting a democratic vote to ratify it. The only state that won't be guaranteed a democratic vote on the final deal will be the UK. Some "taking back control" that is!

Theresa May's refusal to allow any kind of meaningful democratic vote on Brexit isn't the only display of anti-democratic attitudes, there's also the fact that her government are pushing through an appalling anti-democratic power-grab called the Great Repeal Bill that would allow Tory ministers to rewrite the laws of the land with no democratic scrutiny from the Houses of Parliament.

It's becoming increasingly clear that the disgustingly dishonest Vote Leave mob had no intention of giving any measure of control to the British people. What they actually meant when they said "let's take back control", was "you should hand control over your future destiny to the fanatical hard-right fringe of the Tory party".

If Theresa May decides to continue pandering to this fanatical hard-right element of the Tory party then a "no deal" cliff edge Brexit looks inevitable, meaning control will lie with the most extreme elements of the Tory party who want to turn the UK into a low-wage, low-skill, low-welfare, low-regulation, corporate tax haven economy.

And if she somehow develops some competent leadership skills and decides to ignore these incessant demands for an economically ruinous "no deal" extreme Brexit from within her own party, control will clearly lie with the remaining 27 EU states that will all have a democratic veto over any future EU-UK trade deal.

In light of this appalling lose-lose situation for British citizens and British businesses, I wonder how anyone honestly believes that they actually "took back control" when they voted in favour of a Tory administered Brexit.

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Brexiter doublethink

I've just had yet another Brexiter turn up on the AAV Facebook page to opine that I should stop criticising the Tory government's lamentable handling of Brexit, and if I don't I'm guilty of "undermining the democratic process".

 Anyone who has been paying the remotest bit of attention knows that Theresa May was twice defeated in the courts as she tried to scrap parliamentary sovereignty in order to conduct the Brexit process as an all-powerful autocrat who rules by diktat with no democratic scrutiny.

Amazingly the Brexiters who never stopped banging on about the importance of parliamentary sovereignty before the EU referendum suddenly turned apoplectic with rage that Theresa May's efforts to scrap parliamentary sovereignty were defeated in the courts, even going as far as declaring the judges who made the pro-democracy ruling "enemies of the people", trying (and pathetically failing) to raise a 100,000 strong anti-democracy protest mob, and even inciting people to stalk and harass the judges until they're intimidated into changing their minds.

As if this astounding Brexiter u-turn on the importance of democracy wasn't enough, Brexit fanatics are now repeatedly demanding that we all mindlessly support the Tories or we're guilty of "undermining the democratic process".

Anyone who mindlessly supports the Tory government would clearly have to support the Great Repeal Bill, which is an audacious anti-democratic power grab designed to allow Tory government ministers to rewrite the laws of the land without any kind of democratic parliamentary oversight.

The only defence the Brexit Minister David Davis has offered to support this anti-democratic power grab is that there isn't time to do it properly so we should forget about democratic scrutiny and trust Tory government ministers to rewrite the laws with no democratic oversight.

When asked to trust the Tories to behave properly without any democratic oversight it's difficult to forget that the Tory party has been fined the maximum amount by the Electoral Commission for breaking the rules of our democracy, and that 13 police forces have handed Tory eelectoral fraud cases to the Crown Prosecution Service.

When there are clear electoral rules to protect our democracy the Tories break them to suit their own interest, and now they're asking us to trust them to rewrite the laws of the land with no democratic oversight whatever.

To be fair the sheer brass neck of asking us to trust them when they're only in power thanks to electoral fraud is strangely admirable, but the gullibility of tribalist Brexiters in demanding that everyone mindlessly supports this anti-democratic Great Repeal Bill power grab is far from admirable, it's utterly pitiful.

In the warped worldview of Brexiter tribalists we all have to uncritically support the Tory government as they repeatedly assault and undermine parliamentary democracy, otherwise we're the ones guilty of "undermining the democratic process"!

If you don't support Tory efforts to to undermine democracy, you're guilty of undermining democracy!

It's pretty difficult not to marvel at the levels of doublethink necessary for them to adopt such a bonkers position, but this kind of totally backwards thinking is clearly becoming the norm in Brexit Britain.

 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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