Tories in glass houses shouldn't throw stones

We all saw the absolute hysteria that the Tories and their attack dogs in the right wing press whipped up about the Labour MP Clive Lewis using the word "bitch" at a man during an obscure comedy event and then over the unacceptable comments that the new Labour MP Jared O'Mara made long before he became an MP.

The Tory MP Sarah Wollaston was one of the most high profile grandstanders, posting an article from the disgusting right-wing Guido Fawkes blog alongside a demand that Labour sack O'Mara and call a by-election in his constituency.

Wollaston's fellow Tory MP Nus Ghani even tried to trigger an emergency parliamentary debate on Clive Lewis' "bitch" comment. A move that was dismissed by the Speaker John Bercow as "wholly absurd and inappropriate".

Everyone is familiar with the expression about people in glass houses throwing stones, and when it comes to stuff like homophobia and misogyny, the likes of Sarah Wollaston and Nus Ghani knew perfectly well that the Tory party is absolutely full of bigotry when they were kicking up such a stink about Clive Lawis and Jared O'Mara.

And so it came to pass. Within a week of the Tory hysteria over Jared O'Mara it was revealed that the former Tory minister and leadership candidate Stephen Crabb had been sending sexually explicit text messages to a teenager who had applied for a job in his office (the second time he's been caught out sexting women in the space of a year). Additionally another Tory MP Mark Garnier was exposed for calling his female assistant "sugar tits" and sending her out to buy sex toys.

Not only is Stephen Crabb a sex pest who thinks it's fine to abuse his position as an MP to send sexually explicit text messages to women less than half his age, he's also a brazen hypocrite and a homophobic bigot too.

Crabb is a glaring hypocrite because he loves to pose as if he's a devout Christian and happily married man. 

And yes there's no 11th commandment "Thou shalt not send pervy messages to teenage girls on thy work phone", but it should be glaringly obvious to anyone who is serious about their Christian faith (or capable of basic human decency) that sending sexually explicit messages to teenagers is completely incompatible with having respect for your wife.

Despite having been twice caught out proving beyond doubt that he's willing to completely ignore the basic tenets of his professed Christian faith when it conflicts with his personal desire to send sexually explicit messages to women less than half his age, Crabb has repeatedly used Christianity as an excuse for interfering in other people's lives.

In 2007 Crabb voted against legislation to ban discrimination against LGBT people, and in 2014 he voted against gay equality legislation to allow same-sex couples the same right to marriage as heterosexual couples.

Both times he used Christianity as an excuse for his homophobic bigotry, and what's worse is that he's even taken political donations from a bigoted bunch of Christian extremists called CARE that advocate gay conversion "therapy".

Sarah Wollaston and other Tory MPs have every right to criticise the unacceptable comments that Jared O'Mara made. However if they don't speak out with the same fury when it's one of their fellow Tories speaking or acting like a pervert, homophobe, misogynist or bigot, then we can see that their previous complaints were just faux outrage motivated by a tribalistic urge to score political points against their political opponents.

So has Sarah Wollaston posted a hatchet job article about Stephen Crabb, slammed his misogynistic attitudes towards young women and his wife, attacked his bigoted attitudes towards LGBT people, and called for him to be sacked from the Tory party, and a by-election to be called in his constituency (where his majority over Labour is just 314)?

Of course she hasn't.

And has Nus Ghani decided to try to call an emergency parliamentary debate over Stephen Crabb's abuse of his position as an MP to send sexually explicit messages to a teenager?

Of course she hasn't.

This abject hypocrisy makes them part of the problem. If they're only willing to speak out when there are political points to be scored for their party, but they keep their lips tightly sealed when criticism of abuse, misogyny, homophobia or bigotry would damage the Tories, it's beyond obvious that they've got no real interest in confronting bigotry, and any criticism they aim at opposition politicians over bigoted words and actions is just artificial outrage expressed purely for party political advantage.

Nobody has a problem with people calling out bigotry. The issue here is consistency.

It shouldn't really matter whether you think politicians should be harshly punished for the things they wrote on the Internet long before they became parliamentary candidates, or the fact they got caught abusing their position as an MP to send sexually explicit texts to much younger women for a second time. Or whether you think they should be given the benefit of the doubt when they express regret and state that their views have changed and they won't behave like that in future. 

What matters is consistency. If you're going to howl outrage over bigotry, then be consistent. Howl just as much outrage even when the bigot is a member of your own political party. And if you're going to give your political allies the benefit of the doubt, then you absolutely must give the benefit of the doubt to your political foes too. 

In a way the double standards of Tories like Sarah Wollaston and Nus Ghani are perhaps even worse than Stephen Crabb's bigotry. Being a creepy pervert, homophobe and hypocrite just seems to be part of his personality. It's who he is.

Wollaston and Ghani on the other hand have displayed extreme double standards. Calling out bigotry on the opposition benches, but saying nothing about the bigots in their own party trivialises the issue by piggybacking their own party political agenda onto it. 

They want to turn bigotry into a frenzied media circus when it's to their party's advantage, but just days later they won't even issue simple statements of condemnation when the bigot is one of their fellow Tories.

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OR

The Tory PCC election farce

The Tory plan to introduce United States style elected police commissioners was always going to be a disaster. The British public are a fairly apathetic bunch anyway and a huge proportion of those that do feel strongly about voting are vehemently opposed to the politicisation of the police. The turnout at the November 15th 2012 PCC elections was even lower than anyone expected, with a large percentage of voters only showing up to spoil their ballot papers with phrases like "no elected police" or "keep party politics out of the police".

Weeks before the actual election the excuses for low turnout were being practiced by the mainstream media and the political classes, mainly reliant upon the theories that elections in November have slightly lower turnouts than those in May and that stand-alone ballots always have lower turnouts than when multiple ballots are combined (e.g. local elections + European Parliament elections) . This leaves us with a couple of obvious questions. Why were these elections held in November, if political pollsters knew that higher turnouts can be achieved in May? And why were these elections run as an extremely expensive expensive single-ballot, rather than in conjunction with another ballot, lets say the next European elections or the next set of local elections?

The turnout was absolutely pathetic by any measure. The first elected police commissioner to be announced was Angus MacPherson in Wiltshire, where only 15.8% of the electorate bothered to vote. MacPherson collected 35,319 votes out of a constituency of 520,000 giving him an electoral mandate from just 6.79% of eligible voters in Wiltshire.

The indicators from the other 40 police areas are just as bad. On the day of the election Twitter was abuzz with descriptions of empty polling stations, astonishingly low turnouts and spoiled ballot papers and early turnout statistics point to sub 20% turnouts all across the country.
[More analysis to follow here when the full results are made public]

It is quite amazing to think that the Tory led government have spent £100 million on these elections, a sum sufficient to pay the salaries of 3,000 front line police for a full year. Given that these 41 elected police commissioners are going to be pulling in salaries of £80,000 - £100,000 each, that's an annual cost of £3.2 - £4.1 million in salaries, lets say £3.5 million, over the course of five years that's an additional £20.5 million. Over the course of a 5 year electoral cycle, these unwanted PCCs are going to cost around £120.5 million. Enough to pay the salaries of around 723 full time, front line police officers for the full five year period.

If the ballot had the option of voting for 723 front line police, instead of 41 politicians, I'm pretty sure that option would have won a massive landslide victory.

At a time when the Tory government are slashing the number of front line police all over the country (6,800 according to the Guardian) under the guise of "austerity", this ridiculous and expensive shambles is absolutely unforgivable. Instead of creating a tier of political interference in the police, the government could have used these vast sums to keep hundreds of police patrolling the streets. Given this spectacular waste of money at a time when police jobs are being lost all over the country, it is absolutely no surprise that the police have been protesting against this lunacy alongside the people they normally kettle and beat up on demonstrations.

Given the astonishingly low turnout, it is difficult to see how any of these commissioners will be able to claim a public mandate for what they do, especially given the words of the Tory MP Priti Patel in July 2012 when talking about the threat of strike action. She said:

"Any ballot in which fewer than half of those eligible to vote do so should be ruled invalid".

Well these police commissioner ballots resulted in fewer than a quarter of eligible voters casting their votes, can we expect to see these results "ruled invalid"? Of course we can't, because the Tory way is to impose one set of extremely stringent standards on the trade unions, the plebs, the proles, the oiks, etc. Yet maintain a much lower set of standards for themselves, their party donors and their establishment mates. Thus, in Tory minds the Trade Unions must motivate more than 50% of their members to vote in order to legitimise strike action, yet party political Police Commissioners get a mandate to interfere in the police no matter how low the turnout.

Take the Parliamentary expenses scandal as another example of this brazen double-standard. Had you or I embezzled tens, or hundreds of thousands of pounds from our employers, we'd expect to be sacked and then go to jail for it. Dozens and dozens of MPs embezzled vast sums from their employers (us, the taxpayer) with fraudulent expenses claims, yet they just apologised (my carefully calculated expenses fraud was "a mistake"), paid back a proportion of their ill gotten gains and even got to keep their jobs. There are several of them sitting in the most high profile positions in government and the commons (The speaker John Bercow was a house flipper, so was Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, in government itself there are Michael Gove, Ken Clarke, Nick Clegg, Caroline Spelman and several other expenses scammers). Incredibly dozens of MPs didn't learn a thing from the expenses scandal and continue to milk the taxpayer for tens of thousands of pounds by renting out their London homes, in order to claim rent on properties elsewhere in London on their expenses, often on properties they are renting from their fellow MPs! Yet another example of this obvious one rule for us and another for them double-standard is the pleb-gate row.

The odious expenses scamming of so many politicians, the fact that they can get away with brazenly lying to the public without censure, the fact that all three political parties are riddled with vested corporate interests and the fact that all three establishment parties have told glaring manifesto lies, have led to the situation where politicians are even more despised than other hated professions such as bankers, estate agents and the police.

I heard one Tory apologist describe this farcical shambles as "an attempt to democratise the police". An attempt to party-politicise the police, more like it. British "democracy" is an absolute farce, an unelected upper house, an unelected head of state, regional assemblies for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but none for England, a totally unproportional and unrepresentative voting system that creates voter apathy in hundreds of constituencies,  three establishment parties that are almost identical in economic terms. The idea that allowing elements of this self-serving, money-grabbing, expenses-scamming, pseudo-democracy to leak into the police is a good thing, is simply delusional. From here on in, we can expect these party politicians (with the most pathetic mandates in electoral history) to begin using the police forces to score party political points and to benefit the corporate backers of their particular political parties, rather than to address criminal behaviour or to enforce the rule of law.

See also

A thought experiment for plebs
     

Even the police are protesting against this Tory lunacy
     

Damian Green: A brazen public liar
     

An entirely avoidable "Osbornomic" recession