Priti Patel doesn't even know how the law works!

It's widely accepted that Priti Patel is one of the least intelligent members of the least talented government this country has ever suffered, but once again she's made an absolute fool of herself.

You'll probably already be familiar with some of her other blunders, like claiming that applying the death penalty to innocent people would serve as a deterrent, getting caught working as an agent for another state embedded within the UK government, and being unable to read a six digit number off a piece of paper.

Her error this time is particularly sinister and disturbing because it highlights the fact that she has absolutely no understanding of the fundamental basics of how the criminal justice system functions in a liberal democracy.

Patel's latest blunder came about when she put political pressure on the Chief Constable of Avon and Somerset police to ensure criminal prosecution of the activists who took down the statue of Tory slave-trader Edward Colston over the weekend.

This is simply not how the law works, and this kind of political interference represents a dangerous step towards police state authoritarianism.

The way it's supposed to work is that the police conduct an investigation, and then pass their evidence to the Crown Prosecution Service.

The CPS then make a decision whether to bring the case to trial, based on considerations such as the likelihood of conviction, and whether a trial would actually be in the public interest.

The legitimate role of the government, and specifically the Home Secretary, is to propose new laws, and alterations of existing laws, which are obviously subject to parliamentary approval before they can be enacted.

A legitimate position for the Home Secretary to take would be to argue that the current laws prohibiting vandalism of public monuments are not strong enough, and to propose new legislation.

It's completely illegitimate for the Home Secretary to put pressure on the police or the CPS in order to demand prosecutions, because then any case that is brought, can obviously be perceived as politically motivated.

And once we slip into the territory of politically motivated prosecutions, we end up with political prisoners, meaning we're living in a police state.

Patel is obviously far to dim to understand any of this, but ever since the Stalinist Cummings Purge of  the 21 liberal-capitalist Tory MPs in September 2019, the Tory party is even more bereft of talent than it was before.

I'm obviously no huge fanboy for purged Tories like David Gauke, Ken Clarke, Rory Stewart, Justine Greening, Dominic Grieve, Philip Hammond ... but at least these individuals would have been somewhat more likely to actually understand a little bit about the history and structure of the legal system, and the critical importance of avoiding political interference in the application of justice.

The fact of the matter is that if the protesters who organised the statue removal are found, and prosecuted, they can easily demonstrate that the prosecution was politically motivated, thanks to Patel, and then portray themselves as political prisoners if they're convicted.

I'd actually expect black civil rights campaigners to be queuing up to face such a ludicrous prosecution, because the prospect of being jailed for opposing slavery, in a politically partisan trial, would obviously create a powerful martyrdom narrative and turn their predicament into an instant cause célèbre.

Furthermore, conviction at the behest of a right-wing government would make a powerful demonstration of the systemic racism that the Black Lives Matter protesters were protesting against in the first place!

So whichever way you look at it, Patel has screwed up.

If you're you're even remotely liberal, you'll be opposed to politically motivated prosecutions as a matter of principle.

And if you're of the authoritarian persuasion, and want to see the statue-removers punished, then Patel's politicisation of the process has made the prospect of a reasonable conviction all the more difficult than it already was!

As ludicrous as this situation is, it's also deeply concerning, because once again we're an absolute laughing stock of a country, with a profoundly unintelligent and disturbingly authoritarian Home Secretary who demonstrably doesn't give the slightest damn about how the law is supposed to work in liberal democracies.

Any reasonable person, of any political persuasion (other than rabid right-wing authoritarianism) must be left wondering how on earth we've sunk so low.


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OR

Bloody Sunday wasn't "dignified" or "appropriate" and undemining the rule of law is despicable.

On January 30th 1972 the occupying British army in Northern Ireland opened fire and shot 28 unarmed civilians who were attending a civil rights march in Derry, Northern Ireland, 14 of them died and many others have lived with the physical injuries and trauma of that day for the rest of their lives.

For decades the UK government pretended that the shootings on Bloody Sunday were somehow justified, but in 2010 the extensive Saville Inquiry found that all of the victims were unarmed, that several had been shot in the back while running away, that others had been shot while attending to the wounded, and that numerous military figures had given false testimonies in order to cover up the truth.

When the Saville Report was released the Prime Minister David Cameron gave a long-overdue apology to the families of the victims and publicly admitted that the killings were "unjustified and unjustifiable".

Of course anyone with any economic sense or basic human decency must detest Cameron for the ruinous austerity dogma, economy-choking infrastructure underinvestment, and wage repression policies that have trashed living standards for the last 9 years, and for the grotesque systematic abuse of sick and disabled people his government enacted.

However credit where credit is due, he did actually apologise for probably the most grotesquely indecent display of violence and political repression perpetrated by the British state during the "troubles" in Northern Ireland.

But attitudes within the Tory party have shifted dramatically since then with the hard-right Tory Brextremists coming to prominence and the party continually seeking approval from the extreme-right ultranationalist blue-kip demograhpic they're now electorally reliant upon.

The unapologetic Tory contempt for Northern Ireland is quite clear from their continued collusion with the corrupt DUP sectarians, their arrogant stance on the Irish border issue, and from today's extraordinary announcement by the Tory Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Karen Bradley that killings by the UK security services in Northern Ireland were "not crimes" and that those responsible for the killing spree on Bloody Sunday acted in a "dignified and appropriate way".

Of course any government minister with the vaguest grip on reality would know that it's actually up to the judicial system to determine what is and isn't a crime, and that government ministers deliberately interfering in judicial matters is the kind of authoritarian undermining of the rule of law you'd expect to see under crackpot extreme-right governments like the ones in Poland, Hungary and Brazil.

And any minister for Northern Ireland should also know that the UK government has already accepted that Bloody Sunday was outrageous and unacceptable and apologised for it, and that calling the killers "dignified" and their actions "appropriate" is not just grotesque, it's blatantly whacking a political hornets' nest with a stick.

It's as if these hard-right Tories are still upset that the Irish peace process ever happened at all, and they're desperate to actively inflame tensions with their outbursts of offensive and irresponsible rhetoric, their open and ongoing collusion with one side of the sectarian divide, and their outright arrogance over the Irish border issue so that they can settle old scores.

Looking at Karen Bradley's lawless and despicable rhetoric today (and the fact that Theresa May hasn't immediately sacked her for publicly undermining the rule of law) it hard not to notice how an austerity-obsessed inveterate liar with a gambling problem like David Cameron was actually a quite a moderate in comparison to the current Tory rabble!

If Theresa May had any sense she would never have appointed such a gaffe-prone and catastrophically ignorant woman as Northern Ireland Secretary in the first place, and if Theresa May has any respect for the rule of law whatever then Bradley should be sacked for deliberately and publicly undermining it.

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OR

HMP Birmingham: A case study in failed Tory privatisation mania

In October 2011 HMP Birmingham became the first British operating prison to be fully privatised when the Tory-led government handed operations over to the corporate outsourcing giant G4S.

By 2014 whistleblowers at the prison were reporting widespread violence and drug use, prisoners staying in bed all day, and experienced staff quitting in droves.

In 2016 the prison was rocked by a 14 hour riot involving some 500 prisoners. The Tory government then attempted to bury the report that cited staff shortages as a major factor.

In 2017 the Chief inspector of prisons found a violent, dirty, lawless, drug-riddled hovel rated as the worst prison h'd ever inspected.

In 2018 the Ministry of Justice demonstrate the shocking scale of this ideologically driven prison privatisation folly with the emergency state take-over of operations.

Amazingly the privatisation-fixated Tories knew exactly how bad HMP Birmingham was for several year, yet they just sat back and watched it deteriorate rather than admit their ideologically driven prison privatisation agenda was failing.

Even in the days before the emergency take-over they were still delaying because they were busy negotiating "commercially sensitive" contract terms with G4S!

Imagine how badly the contract must have been drafted if the private sector operators can turn a functioning prison into a violent drug-riddled horror show that even the guards are terrified to work in, and still think they've got a leg to stand on to quibble over contract terms when the the government steps in to take over the mess they've created.

Even more amazing is the fact that the Tory government have announced that they plan to hand the prison straight back to G4S after six months!

So G4S take over a functional prison, turn it into an absolute hellpit for the inmates and staff alike, hand it over to the government to clean up at public expense, and then waltz back in six months later to wreck it all over again!

Instead of negotiating over contract terms and then promising to hand the prison back to the failing outsourcing company after just six months, the government should be immediately banning G4S from bidding for any more Ministry of Justice work, calling a moratorium on all justice system privatisations, and announcing a wide-ranging public inquiry into how the prison privatisation agenda went so wrong so quickly.

To anyone with any sense the whole idea of handing prisons over to private companies is absolutely perverse. Only the most fanatical of hard-right neoliberal pro-privatisation freaks could try to argue that the primary function of prisons should be for private companies to generate private profits at the public expense, rather than keeping the public safe from dangerous criminals and rehabilitating lawbreakers so that they can reenter society with the skills and attitude necessary in order to avoid recidivism.

But this is where were at now. The cult of neoliberalism is so embedded within the Westminster political establishment that the majority of MPs and political journalists never criticise the ideologically driven privatisation of prisons, the forensic science service, electronic tagging of prisoners, the probation service, court translation services, or even front line policing. 

Meanwhile the minority of MPs who espouse renationalisation and a preference for not-for-profit public services are continually derided as the dangerous radicals and extremists!

The polling evidence is absolutely clear that the majority of British people are strongly opposed to privatisation mania, but the Westminster political establishment remain stubbornly impervious to the public view that ideologically driven privatisatise everything agenda absolutely stinks.

And that's the problem with the cult of neoliberalism - you can point to as many privatisation failures as you like (HMP Birmingham, collapsed and fraud riddled academy chains, Carillion, the rail privatisation farce, the G4S Olympic security failure, the G4S electronic tagging fraud, the forensic science privatisation calamity, the shambolic privatisation of the probation service, the absurdly inefficient Work Programme, the rip-off water companies, Royal Mail being flogged off at way below its true market value, flogging off the NHS blood supply, and dozens upon dozens of other examples) and you can point to the polling data that says the public hate it, but the neoliberal cultists will simply shrug their shoulders, ignore the evidence, and adopt their arrogant and elitist "we are the enlightened few, and the public are wrong again" stance.

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OR

The Free Tommy Robinson mob are Britain-hating fascists, gullible idiots, and paedophile protectors

On Saturday June 9th 2018 hundreds of extreme-right fanatics descended on London to demand the release of the jailed former-EDL leader and radical extreme-right hate preacher Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon).

These #FreeTommy extremists are trying to cite "freedom of speech" as an excuse for the behaviour that got Yaxley-Lennon jailed, but they're just demonstrating that they don't know what they're talking about.

Yaxley-Lennon was sentenced to 13 months in prison after pleading guilty to contempt of court and violating the terms of his previous suspended sentence to hold a protest outside a court case involving a paedophile grooming gang.

The case he disrupted was subject to reporting restrictions because it's linked to several other cases, meaning that his intervention risked collapsing the case he was protesting outside, and several criminal cases, which would have allowed the alleged child abusers off the hook.

Freedom of speech obviously does not stretch to allowing people to ignore court judgements, and to risk allowing alleged paedophiles off the hook for their crimes by deliberately and knowingly undermining the criminal cases against them.

Yaxley-Lennon was handed his suspended sentence last year after committing contempt of court during a rape trial in Cantebury, and was warned at the time that any further efforts to disrupt the British justice system would see him jailed.

Yaxley-Lennon knew that he was committing contempt of court by risking the collapse of the paedophile grooming trials, he knew that he would be jailed for it, but he did it anyway, and then he immediately pleaded guilty to what he'd done.

It's beyond obvious that he's deliberately playing the martyr in order to build up even more publicity and support, and that all the people jumping on the #FreeTommy bandwagon are too dimwitted and gullible to see that they're being played for the idiots that they are.

One of the most incredible things about Yaxley-Lennon's behaviour is the pure hypocrisy of it. Not only does he claim to care about child abuse but then deliberately and knowingly risk collapsing trials into grooming gangs, he's also remained absolutely silent about the senior EDL member Leigh McMillan when he was jailed for 17 years for the barrage of sexual abuse he inflicted on a 10 year old girl.

When Muslim men are accused of sexual abuse of children Yaxley-Lennon rushes to their trial to try to collapse it and let them off the hook, and when a member of the EDL is found guilty of serial sexual abuse of a child he says absolutely nothing about it as if it will magically go away if he ignores it hard enough.

His erratic and utterly hypocritical behaviour in relation to child abuse actually makes it seem like he's on the side of paedophiles, and the people who are rallying to support him approve of his idiotic efforts to collapse paedophilia trials and allow the accused to get off scot free.

Then there's the fact that Yaxley-Lennon is an extreme-right hate preacher who has already inspired at least one deadly terrorist attack. People who support the #FreeTommy movement are obviously massive hypocrites when it comes to hate preaching and terrorism too, because they froth at the mouth with rage when the terrorism-inciting hate preacher is Muslim, but actively march in his favour when the terrorism inspiring hate preacher is white British. 

The former Smiths front man Morrissey is one of the most notorious celebrities to have jumped on the #FreeTommy bandwagon, citing the spurious "freedom of speech" argument, attempting to blame Labour and the Conservatives for a court ruling they rightly have no control over, and promoting the neo-fascist "For Britain" party set up by Anne-Marie Waters (a woman so fanatically right-wing she was too much even for the Ukippers to stomach).

Donald Trump Jr. also jumped on the #FreeTommy bandwagon by retweeting one of Yaxley-Lennon's supporters, and making the ludicrous insinuation that the United States justice system doesn't have contempt of court procedures, or restrictions on public reporting of sensitive trials.

Another foreigner to jump onto the #FreeTommy bandwagon is the Dutch fascist Geert Wilders who has rocked up as a guest of honour at the Free Tommy demonstration to publicly attack the British justice system.

It's amazing how the extreme-right fanatics who have mindlessly bought into Yaxley-Lennon's deliberate martyrdom act are so keen to attack the foundations of the British justice system that they'll take lectures from a foreign fascist about how British law should be changed to allow people to ignore the rulings of British judges and to disrupt and undermine British court cases.

The funny thing is that the entire mob of Yaxley-Lennon supporters will self-identify as patriots, but they're busy actively demonstrating their contempt towards British values, and hatred of the way Britain actually works.

In Britain we are supposed to get a fair trial, no matter our religion or ethnic origin, and no matter how heinous the crimes we stand accused of. Yaxley-Lennon, Morrissey, Trump Jr, and Wilders clearly want to change this long-established legal precedent to total mob rule, where extreme-right agitators and hate preachers can do and say as they please to attack and undermine court proceedings when the accused are Muslims (but obviously maintain a determined stony silence when the child sexual abuse perpetrator are their fellow extreme-right fanatics).

Perhaps the simplest way to deal with them is to turn their own idiot-logic back on them: If you don't like Britain, and you don't like British values, and you don't like following British laws, why don't you lot just go and live somewhere else?

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

OR

The inane Twitter ramblings of Liz Truss

The current Tory government is rammed full of extremely low calibre individuals who have been promoted way beyond their abilities, and the current Chief Secretary to the Treasury Liz Truss is one of the worst examples of the lot.

You only need to look at her Twitter feed to see what a callous intellectual lightweight she is, yet somehow she's been clunking around at the top of the Tory party for years. Before she was made second in command at the Treasury Theresa May actually saw fit to appoint her Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice.

Feeling Tiggerish

Take Truss's January 26th Tweet celebrating the release of dire economic figures with a picture of the Winnie the Pooh character Tigger and a ludicrous #FeelingTiggerish hashtag.

As second in command at the Treasury Truss clearly has no excuse for not understanding that an annual growth rate of 1.8% is the lowest since 2012, and that a quarterly growth rate of just 0.5% makes for the 8th consecutive quarter of below 2% annual growth (the worst run since the bankers trashed the economy in 2007-08). She also has no excuse for not knowing that the UK economy is languishing with the second lowest growth rate in the entire developed world.

She has no excuse for not knowing this stuff, so she's either profoundly ignorant of the absolute basics of her own job, or she knows perfectly well how bad it is but she's trying to dress this Tory failure up as a success because she has so much contempt for the "lower orders" that she thinks they'll eat her turd and thank her for it, as long as she sprinkles a bit of glitter on it. Either way it's a disgrace.

Miners

Then take Truss's crass January 30th Twitter "joke" about the ideologically driven suffering her party inflicted on miners and mining communities across the United Kingdom.

As a result of the Tory ideological war on the miners and their merciless "leave it to market forces" approach to poverty and unemployment in the communities they trashed there are still dozens of poverty blighted towns across South Wales, the midlands, Yorkshire, the north east, and Scotland.

Yet here's a Tory minister laughing and joking about the miners' strike as if crushing an industry that was once the backbone of the empire, deliberately dividing communities, describing working people as "the enemy within", violently repressing workers' rights and political protests, and putting hundreds of thousands out of work is just a convenient setup for an attempted joke at the expense of a political rival.

What's even worse is that Liz Truss sat in the Tory cabinet that decided to not bother having a public enquiry into the police violence against miners at Orgreave, despite not having even bothered to review the police files first.

Authority

In another Tweet Truss tries to defend hard-right free market fanaticism by opining that that she's "pro freedom" because she has supposedly "never liked being told what to do".

This is a quite extraordinary statement from someone who's job it was until quite recently to head the entire UK legal system as Lord Chancellor and Minister for Justice.

It's a quite extraordinary statement from a woman who has sat in cabinet and voted in favour of scrapping one freedom after another for ordinary people (such as legislating away the freedom from unlawful state surveillance, introducing unlawful Tory charges designed to prevent fair access to the justice system, and the introduction of unlawful Tory forced labour schemes designed to revoke people's freedom to say to to working for highly profitable corporations with no wages and no workers' rights).

Worst of all it's astoundingly hypocritical from a woman who has not rebelled once against her own political party since 2015, no matter how depraved, economically illiterate, or downright incompetent their policies.

Capitalism

Truss's sub-juvenile and offensive Twitter timeline is an embarrassment that is entirely unbefitting of a government minister, but one tweet stands out above all for sheer idiocy, and it's a lazy rehash of the Mensch fallacy that posits that people are somehow a hypocrite if they in any way criticise the capitalist system if they happen to live in a capitalist system.

Apparently, according to Truss, it's somehow hypocritical for the centre-left Labour campaign group Momentum to use buildings, drink coffee, or use social media, presumably because they should only be allowed meet in buildings made of twigs, drink river water, and communicate by shouting if they intend to oppose stuff like corporate tax dodging, the Carillion scandal, low wages, and ruinous Tory austerity dogma.

The glaringly obvious counterpoint is to make the ridiculous argument that anyone who has ever benefited from social ownership or socialist policies (like using the NHS, driving public roads, having a state education, claiming a pension, tax credits, or child benefits, using any other aspect of the welfare system, or taking advantage of workers' rights like the weekend, paid leave, sick pay, parental pay, protection from unfair dismissal or dangerous working conditions ...) is precluded from ever criticising the excesses of the Soviet Union under Stalin, hyper-inflation in Venezuela, or the repression of human rights in China.

It's like the lord of the manor telling the serf that they can't criticise feudalism because the rags they're wearing are the product of the feudal economy.

Just look at the ridicule Truss's former Tory colleague Louise Mensch suffered for using this absurd fallacy, yet here we are years later with an actual government minister making the same idiotic argument.

Liz, you're sounding as stupid and desperate as your ex-colleague Louise Mensch with this pathetic drivel.

And to think you're an actual government minister! pic.twitter.com/4O9f3Fo5PY

— Tom (AAV) (@Angry_Voice) January 30, 2018

Conclusion

 A look at Liz Truss's lamentable Twitter feed, and the knowledge that she's been clunking around at the very top of the Tory government for years tells us all we need to know about the absolute dearth of talent they must be experiencing.

How far we've fallen as a nation that such a person could have risen so far in politics.

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

OR

12 reasons Chris Grayling was an absolutely dreadful Justice Secretary

The fact that a serial failure like Chris Grayling still has an important cabinet position is indicative of the absolute dearth of talent in the Tory party.

Grayling started off as one of Iain Duncan Smith's henchmen at the DWP, the then spent three years as the worst Secretary of State for Justice imaginable.

Despite his almost unbreakable tolerance for abject incompetence from his ministers* David Cameron finally saw sense in 2015 and moved Grayling into largely ceremonial roles where he had little ability to wreak havoc over ordinary people's lives.

After David Cameron's EU gamble backfired so spectacularly Theresa May gave Grayling a lifeline back into a position where he could cause more damage by making him Transport Secretary.

Since then he has bee pursuing policies like handing the Southwestern franchise to the Chinese government to operate (because Tory ideology prohibits the UK state from running UK transport networks, but is fine with the Chinese state running UK transport networks!), deciding to hand operation of the UK taxpayer funded HS2 line directly to foreign governments to profiteer from (France, China and Italy are the bidders), and sneakily cancelling several rail electrification upgrades in Wales and the north of England just days before parliament went off on summer break.

Here's a recap of 12 things that make Chris Grayling not only the worst Justice Secretary ever, but possibly even the worst government minister in David Cameron's dreadful coalition of failure with the Lib-Dems.

Unqualified

Since 2007 the role of Secretary of State for Justice has included the job of Lord Chancellor. Before David Cameron appointed Chris Grayling to the position, every single Lord Chancellor for centuries had been a qualified legal professional. 

Grayling was the first head of the legal system to have no legal qualifications whatever, and this Tory anti-expertise trend has continued after his departure in 2015.

Grayling's successor Michael Gove was the 2nd unqualified Lord Chancellor in modern history, Gove's successor Liz Truss was the 3rd, and her successor David Liddington is the 4th legally unqualified Lord Chancellor in succession.

Unlawful Tribunal fees

It's taken four years and an epic battle all the way up to the Supreme Court to get Chris Grayling's discriminatory anti-worker employment tribunal fees declared unlawful (thanks to Unison for fighting to protect workers' rights).

Despite their claims to the contrary this legislation was always intended as a bad bosses' charter to give terrible employers the freedom to abuse their low-income workers and sack them at will, safe in the knowledge they wouldn't be able to afford the employment tribunal fees.

Not only did these fees act as a deliberate Tory barrier to the justice system for low-income workers, they also demonstrably discriminated against women. It's telling that instead of quitly backtracking on this depraved policy of pricing people out of seeking justice Theresa May carried on fighting tooth and nail to keep these sexist Tory rules in place long after Grayling was gone.

Probation service privatisation

Chris Grayling's ideologically driven privatisation of the probation service was criticised at the time as a reckless gamble, and the resulting chaos is probably even worse than predicted.

Grayling decided that the taxpayer should keep responsibility for probation services for long-term prisoners while probation services for prisoners sentenced to a year or less were carved up and distributed to 21 different private outsourcing companies.

A 2016 report found that ex-prisoners are being failed and the public put at risk. Of the 86 released prisoners the research team investigated not a single one of them had any help in relation to training, education or employment. A third were released with nowhere to live, and one registered sex offender simply disappeared after release.

Legal aid cuts

Legal Aid is a fundamental part of the modern welfare system which prevents the justice system from being just a plaything of the rich by providing adequate legal representation to people from poor and ordinary backgrounds.

Grayling is a fanatical right-winger so he attacked legal aid funding with glee, stripping legal aid entitlement from all kinds of cases. The result was a predictable rise in the percentage of people attempting to represent themselves in court, meaning thousands upon thousands of wasted hours in court (especially family courts) as proceedings had to be abandoned due to procedural cockups from self-representing legal novices.

Aside from the costs and the wasted time, there's also the fact that unknown thousands have been denied justice altogether as they simply gave up on the idea of seeking legal redress for the injustices they've suffered for lack of legal representation.

Restrictions on legal aid for domestic violence victims

As part of Grayling's assault on legal aid he decided to slash women's entitlement to legal aid for domestic violence cases.

If a woman couldn't prove that they'd been subjected to domestic abuse with either medical evidence or legal records from the previous five years they wouldn't get legal aid. This attack on domestic violence victims was widely condemned at the time, and in February 2017 it was finally reversed when the government caved into the pressure to accept evidence from charities, solicitors and housing officers.

Tendering for legal aid contracts

Aside from cutting legal aid to the bone another of Chris Grayling's brainwaves was to introduce tendering for legal aid services, so that people needing legal aid would have no longer have freedom to chose their own lawyer (from a local company, or from a firm of legal specialists in the field required) and simply be handed one from a pre-approved government list.

This planned shakeup was designed to benefit big legal companies and drive small independent legal practices out of business. One of the big players in this get-what-you're given strategy was, believe it or not, the haulage company Eddie Stobart!

Thankfully Grayling's successor Michael Gove listened to the absolute chorus of condemnation from the legal profession and scrapped Grayling's madcap plans.

Selling prison advice to the Saudi tyrants

One of Grayling's most widely condemned schemes was the establishment of a shady commercial offshoot of the Justice Department called Justice Solutions International which won a £5.9 million contract to advise the brutal Islamist tyrants in Saudi Arabia how to run their prisons.

In October 2015 Jeremy Corbyn forced one of his first significant U-turns out of the Tory government by calling for the contract with the Saudi tyrants to be scrapped, which Grayling's successor Michael Gove eventually did due citing "human rights concerns".

Criminal court fees

In 2015 Chris Grayling introduced fees for defendants found guilty at a magistrates court to pay £150 and those convicted at crown court to hand over £1,200.

People complained that the fees were incentivising innocent people to plead guilty to crimes they didn't commit out of fear of being hit with Grayling's fees if they tried to plead their innocence.

Over 100 magistrates resigned over the charges. Grayling's successor Michael Gove scrapped the charges saying the "intent has fallen short".

Cutting legal aid for prisoners

Chris Grayling loved playing up to the hard-right press by devising policies to be tough on prisoners. One of these schemes was a 2013 ruling banning legal aid for prisoners.

In my view you don't have to be a tree-huggling liberal leftie to believe that a prisoner who has been denied any kind of education, offender behaviour programmes or training while locked up should have the right to seek legal intervention to ensure they do get the help they need to avoid re-offending in the future.

In 2017 Grayling's cuts to legal aid for prisoners were ruled unlawful and overturned.

Banning books

Another of Grayling's attacks on the prison population was his ruling banning them from receiving books. This one really hit the headlines because there's nothing quite as right-wing authoritarian as banning books.

In December 2014 a High Court ruling found that banning prisoners from receiving books was unlawful, and Grayling's successor Michael Gove sensibly decided not to bother appealing against the judgement and binned the policy.

Unlawful prison absconder policy

One of Grayling's most ridiculous blunders came when he decided to introduce a knee-jerk policy after the right-wing press whipped up a huge fuss when an armed robber called Michael "Skullcracker" Wheatley went on the run from day release.

Grayling's new policy was to rush through a ban on any prisoner who had absconded from serving in open prison. The problem was that this new policy glaringly contradicted a previous Grayling policy that inmates serving indeterminate sentences should go through a phased release from closed to open prisons "in order to test their readiness for release into the community".

In 2015 Grayling's knee-jerk prisoner absconder policy was declared unlawful at the High Court after a case was brought by a prisoner called John Gilbert who technically absconded from day release because he missed his last train, but handed himself into a police station first thing in the morning.

The judges said the inconsistency between Grayling’s new absconder policy and his long-standing directions to the parole board was "irrational", and they were also "not impressed" by Grayling's absurd claim that since the ban and the parole board directions had both been issued by him, he had the power to ignore or contradict either of them at will!

Making Michael Gove look good

Michael Gove is a Rupert Murdoch hack turned politician. As education secretary he vandalised the education system by privatising thousands of state schools into the hands of unaccountable private psuedo-charities (many operated by major Tory party donors). He also oversaw a proliferation of unqualified teachers into our classrooms and once famously claimed that all schools should attain above average status!

The fact that a bumbling right-wing fanatic like Michael Gove had to come in and clear up so many of Grayling's messes just goes to show how utterly crap he must have been.

Just imagine how ideologically extreme and incompetent a person would have to be in order to end up making a right-wing fruit loop like Michael Gove look level-headed and competent in comparison!

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

OR

* = Despite their serial incompetence Iain Duncan Smith, George Osborne and Theresa May were never sacked, but Grayling's monumental blunders at Ministry of Justice were so huge, and so regular that even David Cameron couldn't ignore them.

Theresa May's "feminism for the rich"

When the BBC announced the pay rates of their highest earning stars Theresa May was quick to wade into the debate to blast the gender disparity between the top earning male and female stars.

While the gender disparity amongst the top six-figure salary BBC stars is an issue, it's worth pointing out that Theresa May has absolutely no qualms about imposing policies that discriminate heavily against the poorest women in society.

Two high profile examples I mentioned at the time were the fact that 86% of the economic burden of Tory austerity dogma has been loaded onto the shoulders of women, and the Tory income requirements for non-EU spouses are twice as likely to force women to live in exile from the UK for the "crime" of falling in love with a foreigner as men*.

Another example of Tory discrimination against ordinary women has been catapulted into the news agenda as their outrageous anti-worker tribunal fees have been ruled unlawful by the Supreme Court on the grounds that the fees have the effect of preventing access to justice.

The Supreme Court ruling found that the Tory tribunal fee regime isn't just unlawful for preventing access to justice, but also because the way it puts women at a particular disadvantage is banned by the 2010 Equality Act.

The fact is that while Theresa May was crying tears of faux outrage about the earnings of extremely wealthy women earnings not matching the pay of extremely wealthy men, she was simultaneously fighting tooth and nail to preserve a system of tribunal fees that discriminates most heavily against low-income working women.

Just think about the searing hypocrisy of posing as a feminist when it comes to the salaries of some of the richest women in society whilst simultaneously battling all the way to the Supreme Court to defend her party's unlawful policy of pricing low income workers out of the justice system that hits the lowest income female workers the hardest of all.

This shocking hypocrisy from Theresa May is evidence that she's only a feminist if it's super-wealthy women like her facing injustice. If it's working-poor women facing injustice then she's determined to make the injustice even worse by deliberately pricing them out of the justice system when their bosses discriminate against them, sack them for getting pregnant or taking maternity leave, or sexually harass them at work.

Some people think that the misandrist anti-men ranters are the worst kind of feminists, but I disagree. These people certainly give feminists a bad name, but in reality they're not feminists at all, they're bigoted female supremacists.

The worst kind of feminist is the kind of feminist who only stands up for women's rights for their own elite class because they are totally and completely immune to their own privilege, or even worse, because they're driven by such hatred and contempt for "the lower orders" that they consider them unworthy of having the same rights as elites, like the right to freedom from discrimination for example.

Theresa May is a woman who is so riddled with elitism and class hatred that she's continued David Cameron's policy of economically persecuting low income women with austerity dogma to fund tax cuts for the mega-rich, and has fought tooth and nail all the way to the Supreme Court to continue the unlawful Tory policy of deliberately pricing low income female workers out of the justice system as a favour to bad employers.

She is only capable of caring about women's rights when it's comes to her own super-wealthy class because she believes in an elitist "feminism for the rich" where deliberate Tory gender discrimination against low-income female workers is perfectly fine as long as millionaire women have pay parity with millionaire men.

What's more Theresa May sees the even greater suffering faced by women in grotesque misogynistic societies like Saudi Arabia, or the women of Yemen suffering horrific Saudi war crimes, cholera and starvation as a small price worth paying in order to make £billions flogging the Saudis the British weapons they use to commit their war crimes with.

Theresa May doesn't give a damn about low income British women because she's a leading member of a political party that has been economically persecuting them and deliberately pricing them out of the justice system for years, and she gives even less of a damn about the even greater suffering of women in countries like Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

One of the most important things about feminism is recognising that the worst gender discrimination, misogyny and violence is almost always suffered by the most vulnerable women in society. 

Feminism isn't something that needs to be addressed top-down by ensuring gender parity amongst privileged millionaires as a priority, it's something that needs to be addressed from the bottom upwards by combating the harshest injustices as a priority, and one of the biggest obstacles to this bottom upwards approach to feminism is demonstrably Theresa May's Tory party.

It's beyond doubt that Theresa May believes in a sickeningly elitist form of feminism where women at the top of society deserve parity with men, but the lower down the social hierarchy, the fewer rights women deserve. 

She believes in this "feminism for the rich" so strongly that she actively and deliberately discriminates against low-income British women in numerous different ways whilst crying tears of outrage over the pay packets of millionaires.

In reality she gives so little concern to women she considers beneath her on the social hierarchy that she even wilfully colludes with the misogynistic Islamist tyrants who rule over Saudi Arabia.

Anyone who imagines that Theresa May is a legitimate feminist just because of her gender, or just because she cries faux tears of outrage over the suffering of her own elite class is a ridiculously gullible idiot who knows nothing about feminism whatever.

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* = During her time at the Home Office Theresa May was the actual architect of this deeply discriminatory policy of using economic apartheid rules to force British people to live in exile for the "crime" of falling in love with non-EU citizens. She doesn't give the slightest damn that these rules discriminate against women, especially women who live in poorer regions of the UK like the north east, south Wales, and Northern Ireland.