The Tory party have used Brexit to engineer an extraordinary anti-democratic coup. It was somewhat ironic that unelected peers in the House of Lords put up the fight in favour of democracy and parliamentary sovereignty, but their "meaningful vote" amendment to the absolute insult of a Brexit bill was defeated in the House of Commons as the Tories (assisted by UKIP, the DUP, the UUP and six appalling democracy-hating Labour Party rebels) cleared the path for Theresa May to scrap the principle of parliamentary sovereignty and set herself up as an autocrat who is beyond democratic accountability.
This defeat for democracy means that the Tory government will be able to make up the terms of Brexit as they go along, with no parliamentary scrutiny or approval whatever. Theresa May and her three incompetent Brexiteers will decide the future direction of the UK and there will be nothing that parliament can do to stop even the most brazenly self-serving of their machinations.
The Brexit situation is now utterly farcical. According to the terms of Article 50 the European Parliament will get a democratic vote on the post-Brexit agreement, but the Tories have engineered it so that the British parliament won't get a vote!
If things get complicated (which they likely will) and the post-Brexit trade deal becomes what is known as a Mixed Agreement, it won't just be the European Parliament that gets a vote, the individual national parliaments of the remaining 27 member states will all get a democratic vote on whether they agree to the terms, but the Tories have engineered it so that the UK parliament won't get a democratic vote!
If the post-Brexit deal becomes a Mixed Agreement it won't just be the national parliaments of the 27 remaining member states that get a vote either, the ratification procedures of Belgium include giving their regional parliaments a veto on the deal. This means that if the post-Brexit deal becomes a Mixed Agreement the Belgian regional parliament of Wallonia will get a democratic vote on it, but the UK parliament won't!
If the EU fail to cave into Theresa May's ludicrous threat-based posturing to fulfil her ridiculous list of demands for special favours for her corporate mates, there's the chance that she will launch a retaliatory and mutually ruinous "nuclear Brexit", and there will be no democratic means available for parliament to stop her doing it.
The only way for this anti-democratic Tory power-grab to be stopped now will be through the courts. However if the courts do decide to reassert that parliament is sovereign, we can be absolutely sure that whoever brings the case will be inundated with rape threats and death threats by the Brexit mob, and the pro-democracy judges will be declared "enemies of the people" again by extreme-right propaganda rags like the S*n, Daily Mail and Express.
The Tories have voted to scrap the principle of parliamentary sovereignty in favour of giving Theresa May authority to do whatever she likes free of any kind of democratic scrutiny. There's absolutely no way that such an anti-democratic power grab could be achieved within the framework of the EU. It's only by quitting the EU that such anti-democratic Tory extremism has been enabled.
It's becoming ever clearer that the European Union is actually very much more democratic than Tory Brexit Britain, and that Brexit was just an excuse for an anti-democratic Tory power-grab to free them from the democratic constraints of parliamentary scrutiny and approval. This anti-democratic Tory scheming makes me wonder how all of the people who voted for Brexit because of issues like "democracy" and "parliamentary sovereignty" are taking this.
I guess the most likely option is total denial, because for Brexit voters to accept this anti-democratic coup for what it is, would mean them accepting that they've been duped into signing a blank contract with the hard-right fringe of the Tory party, and we all know that people have a tendency to prefer the comfort of denial rather than taking the huge self-esteem hit of admitting to themselves that they've been played like gullible fools.
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.
The House of Lords tried to add two amendments to the Tories' Brexit Bill but they were both stripped out again by the Tory government in the House of Commons.
One amendment was to ensure that Parliament has an actual vote on whether Theresa May is able to trigger a socially and economically ruinous nuclear Brexit if her ridiculous threat-based posturing fails to secure a good Brexit deal with the EU.
Before that safeguard was removed, the Tories (with assistance from UKIP, the DUP and a few Eurosceptic Labour rebels) won the vote by 335-287 and scrapped the other Lords amendment designed to ensure that Theresa May doesn't use the lives of the estimated 3 million EU citizens in the UK as bargaining chips in her dangerous game of brinkmanship.
The amendment that the Tories scrapped did nothing more than require the government to bring forward proposals about how they plan to protect the rights of EU citizens living in the EU by the summer. Here's the precise wording:
"Within three months of exercising the power under section 1(1), ministers of the crown must bring forward proposals to ensure that citizens of another European Union or European Economic Area country and their family members, who are legally resident in the United Kingdom on the day on which this act is passed, continue to be treated in the same way with regards to their EU derived-rights and, in the case of residency, their potential to acquire such rights in the future."
It's absolutely clear from the way that the Tories scrapped an amendment that says nothing more than that they should begin seriously considering the rights of EU citizens in the UK, that the Tories see these people's lives as nothing more than bargaining collateral that they can try to squeeze the EU with.
The Tories have shown utter contempt for the concerns of all these EU citizens who live, work, and have families in the UK. They simply don't care about the worries, stresses, and anxieties they're causing so many people by refusing to quell the uncertainty over their futures.
Aside from making a clear demonstration to EU citizens living and working in Britain that the Tories don't give a shit about them, another implication from this decision is that the EU are likely to further harden their negotiating stance. If the Tory government are prepared to keep the Sword of Damocles dangling over the heads of UK-based EU citizens in order to do some hardline posturing for the right-wing press, the EU negotiating team are hardly likely to go into the negotiations offering any of the kind of ridiculous favours for her corporate mates that Theresa May is demanding.
Using people's actual lives as bargaining collateral is disgusting, and clearly indicates that the Tories are completely unwilling to go into the upcoming negotiations in good faith. The consequences are that millions of UK-based EU citizens will be feeling like the country they live in don't give a shit about them, and that by treating their citizens in this way the Tories are pissing off the other EU member states and making the impending threat of a catastrophic Tory nuclear Brexit even more likely than it already was.
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.
The Tory Party are planning to rig the Westminster electoral system in an attempt to lock themselves into power forever. There's no other way of putting it. All of the commonly attempted Tory justifications for the boundary changes are woeful at best. In this article I'm going to detail just a few of the main objections.
The House of Lords
During his six years in power David Cameron stuffed an additional 213 unelected peers into the House of Lords, many of them major Tory party donors and his own personal cronies (his hairdresser, Samantha Cameron's stylist ...). In fact he stuffed unelected peers into the House of Lords at a faster rate than any Prime Minister in history.
The idea that it's necessary to cut the number of elected MPs by 50 in order to "reduce the cost of politics" is an extraordinary attempted justification when the Tories have just added over 200 politicians to the unelected £300 per day for life club. As aresult of all of this crony-stuffing the House of Lords is now the second biggest legislative chamber in the entire world (second only to China) and by far the biggest unelected legislative body on the planet!
What contempt the Tories must have for the electorate to claim that their boundary changes are motivated by a desire to reduce the cost of doing politics when they've spent the last six years stuffing the unelected and already hopelessly bloated House of Lords full of their cronies.
One of the first priorities for any party that is genuinely serious about reducing the cost of politics would be the democratisation of the House of Lords and its reduction in size to a much more manageable level.
The (elected) upper chambers in other large developed nations have far fewer members.
Canada (population 36.2 million): Senate 105 elected members
Spain (population 46.4 million): Senate: 266 elected members
Italy (population: 60.7 million): Senate: 315 elected members
France (population: 66.7 million): Senate: 348 elected members
Germany (population: 82.2 million): Bundesrat: 69 elected members
Japan (population: 127.1 million): House of Councillors: 242 elected members
United States (population: 324.1 million): Senate: 100 elected members
UK (population: 65.1 million): House of Lords: 807 unelected members
It's absolutely clear from these figures that the unelected House of Lords is massively bloated in comparison to other developed nations. If it was democratised and the number of members halved, it would still be significantly bigger than any comparable upper chamber in the developed world.
The English democratic deficit
Devolution for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland has led to an appalling constitutional mess where residents of these nations have proportionally elected parliaments, while all of the English regions outside of London (which has its own proportionally elected assembly) have none.
The English regions should be given a referendum on whether they want regional autonomy and their own parliament (like London) or whether they want to be part of a wider English parliament. Regional autonomy could work well for big regions like Yorkshire (which has a similar size population and economy to Scotland) and also for smaller regions like Cornwall (which has its own unique cultural identity and language). Other areas might prefer to be part of a wider parliament of the English regions.
It's completely unacceptable that residents of the English regions continue to be treated as second class citizens of the UK with no proportionally elected parliament like residents of Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and London.
Any attempt to define the Tory electoral boundary changes in terms of "fairness" is absolutely absurd when no effort is being made to address the English democratic deficit.
The incomplete voting register
Another factor that makes the proposed Tory boundary changes incredibly unfair is the way they have decided to use an incomplete voting register to base the new constituency sizes on.
It's bad enough redrawing constituencies in line with the number of registered voters instead of the actual population of the areas, but using an out-of-date register to make the calculations with is utterly ridiculous.
The Tory decision to base the rejigged boundaries on the electoral register in December 2015 (just after they threw millions of people off it by introducing individual registration) is transparently unfair when it's now clear that two million people have joined the electoral register since (presumably to vote in the EU referendum).
In many areas there are discrepancies in the tens of thousands between the number of people registered in December 2015 and those registered in June 2016. Lewisham is the worst example with a discrepancy of 31,025 voters, which represents a huge 18.6% change in the registered electorate in the space of half a year.
It's literally impossible for Tories to argue that these boundary changes are being done to "more fairly represent the size of the electorate" unless they cynically ignore the fact that the size and distribution of the registered electorate has changed dramatically since the figures they're basing their changes upon, meaning that they're already terribly outdated.
The power imbalance
Reducing the number of MPs while keeping the number of government ministers the same will obviously reduce the ability of parliament to hold the government to account, because there will be fewer non-ministers to scrutinise all of the legislation.
This problem of reduced accountability will be exacerbated by the fact that each MP will experience an average 8.3% increase in their constituency workload on top of the fact that there will be fewer MPs to hold the government to account.
The UK political system is already terribly over-centralised, with the Prime Minister and their cabinet members operating without proper scrutiny, accountability or censure. A reduction in the number of elected MPs would only make this situation much worse.
A growing population and a shrinking parliament?
The number of MPs in Westminster has fluctuated slightly over the years, but the last time the number of MPs went below 615 was the 18th Century. The UK has had well over 600 MPs ever since 1801, with the absolute low point since then coming between 1922 and 1945 when the number was set at 615 (just after independence for the Republic of Ireland).
A comparison between the number of MPs and the population of the United Kingdom reveals that the Tory plan to reduce the number of MPs will leave the UK with by far it's worst level of political representation.
The absurd 5% threshold
Nobody objects to the principle that constituencies should be of more-or-less the same size, but in setting the threshold at just 5% the Tories are ensuring that there will need to be a costly and disruptive set of boundary changes after every election.
If the threshold was set at 5% of the actual population of the areas then changes in population dynamics would necessitate regular boundary changes, but setting it at 5% of the registered electorate makes it even more messy, because (as the situation in Hackney proves) the number of registered voters can fluctuate wildly..
This is yet another example of the Tories "saving money" narrative failing to make sense. If they were really concerned about saving money, they wouldn't have set their arbitrary limit so low and created the need for a costly set of constituency tampering after every single election.
Legitimacy
An awful lot of people seem to have forgotten that over two dozen Tory MPs stand accused of cheating their way to victory at the 2015 General Election by breaking the election spending limits in marginal constituencies. The Tories only have a tiny majority in parliament, and if these boundary changes are enforced it will be through the backing of these MPs who financially doped their way into parliament in the first place.
Fair Votes
If there is one flaw in the Westminster electoral system it's not that there are "too many MPs" it's that millions of people are locked out of the political system as a result of the archaic and unrepresentative Westminster voting system.
There are so many flaws with the Westminster voting system it's wise to stick to just four of the main ones in order to stop this article from getting over-long.
Safe seats
The current Westminster voting system ensures that there are hundreds of "safe seats" where the incumbent party could put up a severed pig's head with their rosette on it and romp to a landslide victory.
The existence of safe seats means that there are an awful lot of extremely complacent MPs in parliament who think they can get away with pretty much anything, safe in the knowledge that their place in parliament is assured by the tribalistic attitudes of their constituents.
One of the benefits of a multi-member proportional election system is that it could pit members of the same party against one another, meaning only the ones who best serve their electorate would be guaranteed a seat.
Disproportionality
The 2015 General Election was staggeringly disproportional. The two new contenders (UKIP and the Green Party) polled over 5 million votes between them but ended up with just two of the 650 MPs. In return for 16.4% of the vote, these parties ended up with just 0.3% of the MPs!
If you add the Liberal Democrats into the mix, UKIP, the Lib-Dems and the Green Party collected 25.3% of the votes between them and got 10 MPs. Labour got 30.4% of the vote and 232 MPs and the Tories got 36.9% of the vote and 330 of the MPs (more than half of them).
If any party is serious about "fairness" they wouldn't be tinkering with the number of MPs, they'd be ensuring that the smaller parties get a fairer representation of the MPs.
Apathy
A system that traps millions of people in "safe seats" and massively discriminates against the smaller parties is one of the fundamental drivers of political apathy. If people thought that their vote actually counted for anything, they'd be far more likely to actually get out and vote.
Non-representation
One of the quirks of the current Westminster voting system is that the vast majority of MPs end up getting elected with less than 50% of the vote, meaning that the vast majority of voters in their constituencies actually voted against them.
The introduction of larger multi-member constituencies would put an end to this farce by ensuring that people have numerous local MPs to turn to. It's funny how Tories always harp on about competition being the driver of efficiency and good performance, but when it comes to competition between local MPs they're suddenly ever so keen to keep hold of their cosy constituency monopolies.
Imagine if you lived in a bigger constituency with six local MPs. Maybe two Tories, two Labour an Lib-Dem and a Green. You could turn to any of them with your issue. Don't you think the rivalry would give the various MPs a very strong incentive to provide the best level of service possible to people like you?
Conclusion
If the Tories were honestly committed to providing a more representative political system (rather than a means of rigging the boundaries to lock themselves into power forever), then the first thing on the list would have to be a fair voting system.
The Tory rhetoric simply doesn't match their proposals. If they cared about the cost of politics they'd address the bloated unelected House of Lords, not trim down the size of the elected House of Commons. And if they cared about fairness then they'd introduce fair votes and put an end to the English democratic deficit.
They don't actually give a stuff about the cost of politics or fairness. All they're interested in is rigging the system to their own advantage by abolishing a load of mainly Labour constituencies in the elected chamber whilst simultaneously stuffing the unelected House of Lords with a load of Tory cronies.
Sign the petition
Stop the boundaries changes - on the official government petition site.
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.
At Prime Minister's questions Jeremy Corbyn did a good job of trapping Theresa May in a lie. In response to his questions over the housing crisis she claimed that house building is higher under the current Tory government, but Corbyn quickly pointed out that she was lying and that it's actually 45,000 house per year lower.
Her response to being trapped in a lie was to launch a diversionary attack on him by quoting an anti-Corbyn tweet at him (about 3 minutes into this video clip of the exchange). It doesn't take much investigation to find that the "Lewis" Theresa May referred to in her anecdote about her Twitter-stalking of Jeremy Corbyn is a guy called Lewis Collins.
This guy has spent the rest of the day patting himself on the back about his newfound fame, as most people would if they were given a shout-out by the Prime Minister and a permanent place in the Hansard public record.
One obvious question that springs to mind about Theresa May's bizarre PMQs response is whether she hasn't got more important things to be doing with her time than personally trawling through Jeremy Corbyn's Twitter replies? Anyone would have thought that dealing with the Tory Brexit mess might be a higher priority, or perhaps figuring out an answer to the repeated questions over whether she supports the UK retaining access to the European Single Market, or whether she wants Britain to quit the biggest free trade zone in human history.
Another obvious question is how on earth Theresa May and her team thought it was appropriate to give a huge boost of free publicity to a guy who turns out to be an extremely distasteful troll.
It seems that whoever scripted this part of Theresa May's speechfailed to do even a rudimentary background check into the person they were giving this huge free publicity boost to, otherwise they would have come across his regular use of mental health based insults (people with different political opinions are always "mongs", "retards", "tards", "leftard", "demented", or he tells them to "get your doctor to up your dosage" or rants on about how "care in the community isn't working") his misogynistic comments (especially against women he deems to be ugly), his regular displays of economic illiteracy (maybe actually a plus for a party that had George Osborne as chancellor for six years?), his excuse making over extreme-right violence (including a defence of the extreme-right fanatic who murdered Jo Cox and the recent killing of a Polish man in Essex), his transphobia (he really doesn't like Eddie Izzard referring to him as "that" in one Tweet), his plentiful Islamophobic ranting, his David Icke conspiracy retweeting, and his habit of making jokes out of extremely unfunny things (like knife crime at the Notting Hill Carnival, the murder of Jo Cox and the closure of BHS with the loss of 11,000 jobs).
Whenever I Retweet things I always have a quick nosy to see who I'm retweeting to make sure I'm not giving free publicity to some hate-spewing troll by mistake, and I've just got a Twitter account with fewer than 14,000 followers. Theresa May is the bloody Prime Minister of the UK and she's written this hate-spewing extreme-right troll into the permanent Hansard record by repeating his feeble jibe at Jeremy Corbyn in the House of Commons and name checking him for it.
Aside from all of that the guy also has a creepy obsession with the Keith Vaz scandal. Even Theresa May (in a rare moment of decency) made a comment about how the Vaz scandal was something for Keith Vaz to deal with not her. It's obviously not such a great idea for any party leader to try to make political capital out of a sex scandal because it's clearly only a matter of time before one of their own MPs gets caught doing something just as deviant or worse, so her stance was understandable. However by giving a parliamentary retweet to someone with such a fixation on the Keith Vaz affair, Theresa May has undone one of the only bits of decency I've seen from her since she became Prime Minister.
One other thing that is interesting about this Lewis Collins account is how he accuses other people of been "sheep" and "sheeple" but his account mirrors the mainstream news agenda precisely. This week it's Keith Vaz, before that it was "Traingate", before that it was whatever the right-wing press pack were chuntering about. If you ever needed to look into the psyche of the typical right-wing rote learner who mindlessly absorbs all of their political opinions drip fed to them by the right-wing propaganda barons, you'd be hard pressed to find a better example than the Twitter account of Lewis Collins.
One last question this raises about theresa may is why pick this extreme-right drooler in the first place. If she wanted to find a Twitter comment to score points against Jeremy Corbyn, why on earth didn't she pick someone like J.K. Rowling (who has been having a complete meltdown on Twitter over Corbyn's likely re-election as Labour leaders) or better still one of the Anyone But Corbyn Labour MPs like Tom Blenkinsop or Ian Austin who have been having bizarre Twitter tantrums since the Anyone But Corbyn coup was launched?
Why on earth has Theresa May given free publicity to this appalling person, when there is so much ammunition to choose from being supplied to her and the rest of the Tories by the Labour Party's own MPs and celebrity supporters?
It looks an awful lot like Theresa May doesn't have a clue what she's doing when it comes to social media and just gave a massive parliamentary big-up to a hate-spewing, misogynistic, transphobic ranter by mistake. The only other explanation is that her team knew what kind of person she was giving a shout-out to, and it's actually deliberate. "Be a vile attention-seeking hate-spitting ranter like Lewis Collins and you too could win a shout-out from the Prime Minister in the House of Commons"!
Is that really the kind of message they're trying to project? Personally I doubt it. I think it's just a case of Tory incompetence. They didn't even bother to check that the person they decided to give a massive unprecedented boost of free publicity to wasn't the kind of person to hurl transphobic abuse and make excuses for the extreme-right killings of Jo Cox and that poor Polish lad in Essex.
Next time you hear any right-winger trying to make a jibe about "is this 'the kinder gentler politics' we've heard so much about" when they come across a left-winger spouting abuse, just remember that Jeremy Corbyn has consistently condemned all forms of personal abuse, while Theresa May has given an abusive misogynistic ranter absolutely huge props by permanently writing his name into the public record with her Parliamentary shout-out.
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.
