The Green Party's only MP Caroline Lucas has completely and utterly lost the plot over Brexit.
For years she was one of my absolute favourite politicians. She led the Greens when they were the only UK-wide party opposing ruinous austerity fanaticism (Labour pushed pathetic austerity-lite rubbish until this pathetic non-opposition cost them the 2015 general election and triggered the Corbyn fightback against the "centrist" policy of imitating Tory austerity fanaticism, rather than opposing it). Lucas has also consistently been on the right side of important parliamentary votes (alongside Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott, John McDonnell, and Dennis Skinner she was the only other MP with sufficient principles to vote against Theresa May's racist hostile environment, David Cameron's disastrous war-mongering in Libya, and Theresa May's enhanced state snooping powers, and George Osborne's welfare vandalism bill).
Over the last few months it's been bad enough watching the Greens voluntarily turning themselves into recruitment agents for the austerity enabling, privatisation scamming, welfare vandalising, workers' rights attacking, fracking tax cutting, disability persecuting, student impoverishing, electoral reform abandoning Lib-Dem warmongers, but Lucas' "fantasy cabinet" of herself and ten all-white, all-female MPs is an extraordinary blowout.
Here are details on the ten other women Lucas wants to orchestrate a "foil Brexit at any cost" coup with:
Anna Soubry: Ex-Tory Soubry talks a good game pretending to oppose Brexit, but when it came to the crunch she actually voted in favour of Theresa May's hard Brexit shambles of a Withdrawal Agreement! Soubry has also made it absolutely clear that she'd prefer a ruinous Tory-administered Brexit than stopping Brexit under a Corbyn-led Labour government. She also referred to the ruinous living standards destroying policies of the austerity coalition that laid the groundwork for Brexit as "marvellous".
Heidi Allen: Another ex-Tory. As a Tory she once cried in parliament about the devastating impact of Tory welfare vandalism to gather "compassionate Conservative" headlines, before wilfully marching through the lobby to vote in favour of even more of the welfare vandalism and devastating cuts she was crying over. She's also responsible for the stupidest and most dangerous Remainer idea yet, which is to just let No Deal go ahead, then try to magically undo it using retroactive legislation!
Jo Swinson: She isn't a Tory, but she might as well be, having been more loyal to the Tory whip during the ruinous austerity coalition than numerous Tory MPs (including recent Tory leadership candidate Jeremy Hunt!). Whatever horrible abuse and economically illiterate nonsense the Tories were pushing, Swinson wilfully voted it all through, refusing to protest by resigning as Employment Minister, even when they launched their vile and unlawful policy of protecting bad bosses by pricing low-income workers out of the justice system with £1,200 upfront Tribunal Fees. She's also bankrolled by the owner of a fracking operation and voted in favour of Cameron and Osborne's massive tax cut for onshore fracking (which makes her a very odd bedfellow for a Green MP).
Justine Greening: If you're going to stuff your "fantasy cabinet" full of ex-Tory austerity enforcers and Lib-Dem austerity enablers, you might as well include a sitting Tory MP just to hammer home the point that opposing the austerity fanaticism that caused Brexit in the first place will be an absolute non-priority. Aside from being a horrifying austerity-enforcer, Greening was also personally in charge of the mass privatisation of state schools in England. The vast majority of Brits believe that schools should be run as not-for-profit public services, but somehow Lucas wants to include a hard-right school-privatising extremist in her "fantasy cabinet".
Nicola Sturgeon: Sturgeon does occasionally let herself down with cheap partisan political point scoring (which is regrettable, but understandable given the tides of absolute filth that are spewed in her direction), but in general she's a really strong and popular leader. The main problem with the inclusion of SNP figures like Sturgeon and Kirsty Blackman is that Swinson and the Lib-Dems have outright refused to work with the SNP to stop Brexit because they actually see preventing another Scottish independence referendum as a much higher priority than stopping Brexit.
Liz Saville Roberts: Including Plaid Cymru's only female MP is an obvious choice if you're doing a stupid identity politics driven all-female "fantasy cabinet". She has been a hard-working MP since arriving in parliament in 2015, and she's on the decent side of parliamentary divisions the majority of the time. It's hard to see how an alliance between a Welsh independence MP and the ultra-unionist Lib-Dems could ever really hold up for very long though.
Sylvia Hermon: Again, there's nothing particularly wrong with the former UUP, now independent Northern Irish MP Sylvia Hermon. It's just an odd selection to pick a solitary independent MP from Northern Ireland, unless the reason is the tokenism of picking the only Brexit-sceptic MP in Northern Ireland (the DUP are hard Brexit militants and Sinn Féin refuse their Westminster seats on principle).
Emily Thornberry: Reaching out to a serving Labour Party cabinet minister to engage in a plot to sideline Labour from the anti-No Deal fightback is a bold move, but Thornberry is surely far too sensible a political operator to ditch her career by joining this ludicrous identity politics publicity stunt.
Yvette Cooper: Cooper is one of the oddest picks of all. Yes she's involved herself in opposing Brexit, but she's stopped short of calling for another referendum (unlike Labour front bench MPs like Diane Abbott, who has repeatedly made the case for a final say referendum on Brexit).
- The inclusion of a load of pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, pro-fracking, Heathrow expansion-supporting, solar subsidy slashing MPs in Lucas' "fantasy cabinet" just goes to show how wildly she's lost her way. She won so much admiration for her principled stances on austerity, welfare, privatisation, and the environment, and now she's bulldozing the lot into a fire pit in order to cavort with hard-right austerity enablers and fracking advocates!
- The idea of gender exclusion is absolutely terrible too. Anyone who is genuinely opposed to Brexit must understand that a ludicrous identity politics dick-counting exercise is a pointless distraction. Anyone who thinks an unprincipled loudmouth like Anna Soubry is more of an asset to the Brexit fightback than Dominic Grieve or Keir Starmer, simply because she's female, is absolutely out of their god-damned tree.
- An all-white cabinet which includes several Brexit enablers, whilst excluding significantly more anti-Brexit BAME women like Diane Abbott, Dawn Butler, Marsha de Cordova, and Rupa Huq is extraordinary. And their exclusion makes no sense either. Lucas reached out to Thornberry who is in Corbyn's shadow cabinet, so she could have reached out to Abbott and Butler too, and she reached out to Cooper who is a Labour back bencher, meaning there must be some other reason she decided not to involve BAME Labour backbenchers like Huq and de Cordova.
- One of the most worrying things is that nobody in the Green Party seems able or willing to take her to one side and ask her to stop this increasingly erratic and damaging behaviour. There's absolutely no way that this all-female all-white "fantasy cabinet" idea including a load of austerity-enablers, privatisation fanatics, and environmental vandals was approved at Green Party conference, so she's not only making a fool of herself, she's also making a mockery of the Green Party's claim to be the most democratic and accountable party in UK politics.
- The whole thing seems to be a desperate last-ditch effort to exclude Corbyn and the Labour-left from the process, even though it's absolutely obvious that the support of the Labour-left would be absolutely vital if Lucas ever gets the "another roll of the dice" referendum she's expended so much energy on demanding (whilst ignoring the role austerity fanaticism played in causing Brexit in the first place).
- And last but not least the whole idea of a "foil Brexit at any cost" cross-bench coup is absolutely terrible anyway. If you wanted to think of the ideal way of empowering Boris Johnson to seize the moral high ground and romp to a general election victory, an unelected Westminster establishment clique overturning Brexit without even a General Election or Referendum result to give them a mandate would be pretty much exactly what the Brextremists would be wishing for!
Caroline Lucas is far from the only person to have been driven to absolute insanity by Brexit, but seeing a strong and principled woman I really admired degenerate to the point of proposing ludicrous unworkable nonsense that burns all of her preexisting principles to ashes is definitely the saddest case of Brexit Brain Worms yet.
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In March 2016, just days after the (now departed) Tory education secretary Nicky Morgan announced her plan to force privatise every single school in England it was revealed that one of the flagship Tory academy chains was riddled with financial mismanagement and outright fraud.
The outrageous scamming at the Perry Beeches academy chain in Birmingham should have served as a dire warning about the future of the English education system under Tory rule. In their haste to carve up the education system and distribute it (for free) to their private sector mates, the Tories have created an unaccountable free-for-all for some of the most greedy and unscrupulous people in society (including several millionaire Tory donors) to pilfer taxpayer funded education budgets to line their own pockets.
In August 2016 the former head of another Tory flagship school and two other staff members were found guilty of fraudulently siphoning public money into their own personal bank accounts. Sajid Hussain Raza, Shabana Hussain and Daud Khan were found guilty on all charges of pilfering money from Department of Education grants to the King Science Academy in Bradford.
Before this fraudulent pilfering of public funds even came to light the Kings Science Academy school was already mired in controversy for a rip-off deal to rent the land it was built on at a cost of almost £6 million over 20 years when the Local Authority used Compulsory Purchase Orders to buy a plot of land for another school (the Appleton Academy in Wyke) at a tiny fraction of the cost (£362,000 in total).
It should come as no surprise at all that the landlord soaking up £296,000 per year in rent is a company operated by a millionaire Tory donor and former vice-chairman of the party Alan Lewis.
In a way it's astonishing that the staff at the school will likely go to jail for fraudulently pilfering a few tens of thousands of pounds of public money into their own bank accounts, while the Tory party bigwig who will continue siphoning almost £300,000 per year out of kids' education budgets for the next 15 years will get away with it scot free.
The scandals at the Perry Beeches academy chain and the Kings Science Academy are clearly just the tip of the iceberg in an unaccountable and increasingly fragmented education system.
Just a quick look into the scamming techniques used by multiple academy chains in order to top-slice education budgets is proof that the Tory reforms have turned our taxpayer funded schools into lucrative cash cows to be milked by some of the most unscrupulous people in society.
Of course all of these people who are busy raiding six figure salaries, plus expenses, plus gold plated pension contributions out of our childrens' education budgets will have some internal justification monologue for what they're doing. They'll sleep like babies at night without the faintest concern for the fact that the Bentley in the drive of their new mansion and their luxury holiday at the Taj Lake Palace have come as a direct consequence of raiding the taxpayer funded education budgets intended to provide a decent level of education to thousands of kids.
The greedy topslicing of education budgets and the numerous cases of outright fraud demonstrate that the Tory ideological agenda of privatising the state education system is an absolute disaster for all but the lucky few who get to milk the cash cow, but somehow only a small minority of people seem even remotely concerned about it.
I guess most people are just so complacent and apathetic that they think it's perfectly fine and natural that the Tories have been allowing some of the most unscrupulous people in society (including millionaire Tory donors and outright criminals) to raid taxpayer funded education budgets for their own personal enrichment. Perhaps most people just think that outrageous scamming like this is just the natural order of things and just shrug their shoulders about it before going off to rote learn tropes like "Theresa May is a safe pair of hands" from their favourite tax-dodging billionaire sociopath owned propaganda rag.
Theresa May has made her intentions towards the education system perfectly clear by appointing Justine Greening as her new education secretary. If May wanted to stop the outrageous scamming that went on under David Cameron's watch, the last thing she would have done is appoint a woman who as a governor of a local school oversaw the sale of school sports facilities to property developers and then supported the give-away of the school to ARK academies which was being run at the time by yet another millionaire Tory donor called Stanley Fink.
If we continue to allow a load of Tory donors and outright criminals to pilfer education budgets to line their own pockets then our kids are obviously going to get worse levels of education than they would have otherwise, and the UK is going to continue slipping further and further behind the more advanced societies where teachers are treated with the respect they deserve and their education systems are considered a vital component of society and the economy, rather than just an opportunity for a bunch of politically connected scammers to siphon as much taxpayers' cash into their own pockets as possible.
What we can do
The Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn opposes the ongoing Tory privatisation of the English education system and proposes to undo the damage by introducing a National Education Service to oversee the education system.
You can follow the work of the Anti-Academies Alliance and the education campaigner Michael Rosen.
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.
Over the last six years the Tories have been carrying out a mass privatisation of the English education system. So far over 5,000 schools have been transferred, for free, to a bunch of unaccountable private sector pseudo-charities like the fraud riddled Perry Beeches academy chain in Birmingham.
The anti-intellectual backstabber Michael Gove privatised the most schools in his four years as education secretary, then he was followed by the widely detested Nicky Morgan who promised to force privatise every single school in the country. Rebellions in several Tory councils who quite like having control over their own schools forced a partial climbdown, but the threat of forced privatisation still looms over thousands more schools.
When Theresa May was anointed as Prime Minister she conducted one of the most ruthless culls of government ministers in history. The fact that Nicky Morgan was one of the victims was cause for celebration amongst teachers, pupils, parents and anyone who just gives a damn about the UK having an education system that isn't a complete shambles.
Unfortunately her replacement seems to be just as bad, if not even worse. In 2012, just months after the Olympic games Justine Greening backed the sell-off of the sports facilities of one of her local schools in Putney. Six tennis courts, a football pitch and a playground were sold off to property developers*.
Greening was on the board of governors and did nothing to stop the sell-off, then she supported the move to hand the school over to a private academy chain called ARK academies, which at the time was being run by the millionaire Tory party donor Stanley Fink (who now sits in the bloated anti-democratic House of Lords as an unelected Tory peer).
It would be laughably naive to imagine that Greening is going to change direction away from privatising our schools into the ownership of unaccountable private sector interests and then allowing them to top-slice education budgets in order to pay themselves obscene six figure salaries.
The Tories are ideologically wedded to the concept of transferring public infrastructure, property and services to private unregulated interests that it doesn't really matter who they appoint as education secretary; the privatisation policy is going to continue. In fact, Justine Greening's personal track record is a strong indicator that she's going to be every bit as fanatical about privatising the rest of the English education system as Nicky Morgan was.
The only way to stop this fanatical policy of transferring schools to unaccountable private interests is to vote against the Tories at every opportunity you get, and in the meantime get involved in protests against the forced privatisation of schools in your area.
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.
