When are British workers going to start blaming the Tories?

In 1896 Peter Kropotkin wrote that "the worker feels vaguely that our present technical power could give abundance to all, but he also perceives how the capitalistic system and the State hinder the conquest of this well-being in every way". Given the huge technological advances in the last 120 years his idea of abundance for all stands truer than ever, especially in an advanced and wealthy society like the UK.

The reality is starkly different. Workers in the United Kingdom have suffered the joint biggest collapse in the value of their wages of any country in the developed world. Since 2008 only workers in crisis stricken Greece have seen such huge declines in their real terms incomes.

Things have got so bad that a record high of 3.8 million workers are living in poverty, plus another 2.6 million children in working households who are living in poverty. In Tory Britain having a job is no safeguard from poverty, and having parents who work is no safeguard from poverty for children.

While the burden of Tory austerity has been loaded onto vulnerable people and ordinary working families, the bankers who actually caused the global financial sector meltdown continue to get vast bonuses and the tiny super-rich minority have literally doubled their wealth. 

It should be crystal clear to every worker that Tory economic policy is actively pushing things backwards. Technological abundance should mean that fewer and fewer workers should be living in poverty, but under Tory rule the huge advances of the 20th Century are being rapidly snatched back from the majority of people and redistributed to the super-rich minority (the people who completely bankroll the Tory party).

The really sad thing is that the modern British worker doesn't even seem to understand the basic fact that the Tory party exists in order to promote the interests of the super-rich at the expense of everyone else.

Millions of British workers actually went out and voted for for the Tories in 2015, then millions more voted for Brexit in 2016 thinking that their rebellion would somehow make their circumstances better by giving the political establishment a kicking.

Now the reality is becoming clear. Brexit has handed even more power to the Tory party, who simply switched their leader and then continued exactly the same policy of extracting wealth from the majority of people in order to redistribute it to the super-rich minority.

Brexit has simply given fanatically right-wing Tories like Michael Gove the green light to ask British businesses to draw up lists of the employment and consumer protection rules they would like to see scrapped so they can make more profits for themselves at the expense of their workers and their customers.

Brexit was a snake oil revolution that looks set to lead to a Tory bonfire of employment rights and even more rapid declines in standards of living for British workers than they achieved between 2010 and 2015.

If Brexit is going to come with a huge price tag, then it's absolutely guaranteed that a Tory government will extract that cost of it from ordinary people in order to protect the the interests of the super-rich*. 

Even if Brexit causes the already appalling declines in workers' wages to accelerate, it seems likely that the Tories will maintain their grip on power. They only needed 24% of the electorate to vote for them in 2015 in order to achieve a majority government.

As a result of George Osborne's austerity con British workers suffered the longest sustained fall in the real value of their wages in history during the last parliament, yet the Tories not only won, but actually increased their grip on power.

Now it's become clear that British workers are getting the absolute worst deal in the developed world alongside Greek workers, but if things continue to follow the same pattern the Tories will win the next General Election with a landslide victory!

The only way to break this pattern is for sufficient British workers to wake up to the fact that the cause of their problems isn't immigrants, or unemployed people, or the EU, or whichever scapegoats the mainstream press are pushing ... The cause of their problems is the Tory economic policy of extracting wealth from the majority in order to redistribute it to the super-rich minority.

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

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* = In fact one of the first (and only) Brexit policies the Tories have announced is their determination to continue the vast handouts showered on the wealthy landowner class by the EU.

13 years of lost wage growth

We already know that since the global financial sector meltdown UK workers have suffered a catastrophic 10%+ decline in real wages (matched only by Greece in the developed world). Now analysis of Philip Hammond's Autumn Statement by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has shown that UK workers look set for even more wage stagnation.

The boss of the IFS Paul Johnson described the latest figures as "dreadful" and pointed out that the woeful economic policies of the Tory government and the failure of David Cameron's Brexit gamble mean that real terms workers' wages will still be well below 2008 levels in 2021.

It's impossible to fully explain how much social and economic damage is going to be caused by this lost 13 years of wage growth.

It doesn't take a genius to understand the economics of demand. If people have money in their pockets they're more likely to spend it. If they suffer 13 years of wage stagnation thanks to Tory policies like ideological austerity, deliberate wage repression, the erosion of in-work benefits and attacks on workers' rights, then they're going to have less money to spend than they otherwise would, meaning less demand in the economy, and fewer stable well-paid jobs as a consequence.

The Tories have created a deliberate downward spiral in workers' wages and working conditions (unmatched anywhere in the Western world apart from crisis stricken Greece) and the economic fallout from Brexit is about to make this already appalling situation even worse.

13 years of lost wage growth, a £122bn Brexit
black hole, missed targets, broken promises ...
yet the Daily Mail present their readers with
this "Everything is Awesome" front page!

13 years of lost wage growth would be bad enough in its own right, but it's obviously even worse when you factor in things like soaring housing costs (continued unsustainable house price inflation and the ever inflating rents charged by the unregulated buy-to-let slumlord rentiers), constant above inflation hikes in public transport costs, post-Referendum inflation, and the increased cost of imports due to the collapse in the value of the Pound.

The astounding thing is that despite the six years of severe and sustained decline in their real terms wages that workers have already suffered under Tory rule, millions of ordinary working people continue to believe the propaganda in the right-wing press that the Tories are doing a great job of managing the economy!

People are apparently so susceptible to what the mainstream media tell them that they'll ignore the real evidence of their own lives, and the real evidence of the lives of the people around them, and choose to believe the ludicrous right-wing fairy stories about how awesome everything is.

The fact that we're undergoing the worst collapse in living standards since the Second World War makes me wonder when it was that British people actually lost their spines and became such a grovelling bunch of weaklings who are perfectly content to have a bunch of Tory toffs rob them blind for 13 long years with barely a whimper of complaint?

During the Second World War people accepted the sharp decline in living standards because they knew that their way of life was under existential threat from continental fascism. They put their all into defending our country, then after the war was won they demanded better for themselves, resulting in the foundation of the NHS, the construction of millions of decent affordable homes, the introduction of Legal Aid and the longest sustained improvement in living standards in British history.

What is it about the current generations that we meekly accept a similar decline in living standards to the Second World War when there is no existential threat like Nazi Germany to justify it?

When did the British public become such a weak and docile bunch that they'd accept being robbed blind for 13 years, while the Tories and the right-wing press tell us a pack of ridiculously unbelievable lies about how great everything is?

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

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Owen Smith's out-of-touch Sports Direct comments

Owen Smith's bizarre below-the-belt dig at Jeremy Corbyn's leadership for being like Sports Direct just goes to show how utterly out-of-touch some of these coup plotter MPs are.

These people earn £75,000 a year, plus tens of thousands more in expenses, plus tens of thousands more if they hold positions in the shadow cabinet. Some of them who were parachuted into safe Labour constituencies essentially have jobs for life. Most of the others can look forward to retirement in the £300 per day (tax-free) unelected House of Lords, or cushy consultancies at PR firms or corporations hoping to cash in on their political connections.

In contrast 90% of Sports Direct employees are on insecure Zero Hours Contracts. The company was recently slammed for illegally paying workers less than the minimum wage and treating their staff like sub-humans. Staff were subjected to humiliating searches and left so afraid of losing their jobs that they avoided taking toilet breaks. One woman was so fearful about her job that she gave birth in a toilet cubicle. Other women were even promised permanent contracts in return for sexual favours.

The Labour coup plotters don't like their boss. They resent the fact that Labour Party members chose a man they don't want to work with. Several of them flatly refused to serve in his shadow cabinet from day one. Others damaged the party by constantly briefing against the party leadership in the press. Others engaged in a grubby sequence of pre-planned resignations designed to bully their boss into quitting just at a time when the country most needed the opposition to speak with a unified voice in condemnation of the Tories. Others have deliberately fabricated evidence of "abuse" in order to inflict as much damage as possible on the party they pretend to love.

Anyone who has worked for private companies in the past (Sports Direct or otherwise) knows damned well that inflicting this scale of damage on the company reputation would lead to immediate sacking, yet when it comes to the appalling behaviour of these MPs Jeremy Corbyn is still offering to forgive and forget.

Nobody is claiming that Jeremy Corbyn is perfect, he's only been in the leadership job for ten months. He's been learning on the job and made mistakes along the way. Of course he's not going to have become an ideal boss in such a short amount of time, but comparisons with Mike Ashley and the management of Sports Direct as quite frankly ridiculous.

By making such a hyperbolic and frankly insulting comparison Owen Smith has demonstrated that he's completely out of touch with the reality faced by millions of exploited low-income workers across the UK. It's no wonder that five million voters abandoned the Labour Party between 1997 and 2010 when the Party has bred such complacency that MPs are prepared to use the plight of exploited workers just to score cheap political points within the Westminster bubble. 

What cheek they have to compare their own privileged position in society to the employees of one of the most ruthlessly exploitative companies in Britain.

Jeremy Corbyn is one of the only high profile political figures who seems genuine in his concerns for the working poor, yet his opponents within the Labour Party are determined to show how out of touch with reality that they are by comparing their own plight to the the workers of a company that has been described as a 21st Century workhouse.

They're so insulated within their own bubble of wealth and privilege that they're seriously comparing their own privileged situations to the plight of some of the most unfortunate workers in Britain. What makes this behaviour all the more insulting is that understanding the plight of, and defending exploited workers is the exact purpose the Labour Party was originally built for.

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

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The "workers right are not protected by the EU" lie

Anyone who is familiar with my work knows that I'm left-wing. I'm left-wing because I think that some infrastructure and services are far too important to be left to private profiteers, and are much better if they are run as not-for-profit public services.

The EU referendum debate is very interesting because it's not a left-wing vs right-wing contest. You have hard-right people on both sides of the debate and also very left-wing people on both sides too.

The Leave campaign is supported by right-wing zealots like Michael Gove (the guy who privatised thousands of publicly owned schools into the hands of unaccountable private sector pseudo-charities and openly declared that people should ignore the experts and use their gut instincts when making important decisions), Priti Patel (a vile reactionary who detests workers' rights), Chris Grayling (the guy David Cameron put in charge of privatising the UK justice system), John Redwood (a guy who wants to see the UK turned into the World's biggest tax-haven), Arron Banks (a guy who bankrolls UKIP and wants to see the NHS privatised) and Iain Duncan Smith (a rabidly right-wing narcissist who actually compared his callous treatment of the unemployed and disabled with the slavery abolition movement). However Leave also has the support of some admirable old-school left-wingers like Dennis Skinner and Dave Nellist.

The Remain campaign is supported by the likes of David Cameron (an inveterate liar), George Osborne (surely the most under-qualified and incompetent Chancellor in living memory), Theresa May (a disgusting right-wing authoritarian who has introduced much of the absolute worst legislation during Cameron's stint as Prime Minister), Nick Clegg (a man who sold his so-called principles for a tiny taste of second hand Tory power) and Tony Blair (the right-wing neoliberal who usurped the Labour Party and switched it from being a social democrtic party to a Thatcherite one). However Remain also has the support of genuine left-wingers like John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn, as well as the bulk of the trade union movement.

I'm definitely not pro-EU (I've probably written far more detailed criticism of the EU than 99% of Brexiters) but I decided that the case for quitting the EU is far too weak if there's not actually a specific plan of action for how to restructure the UK economy/legal system/constitution/trade relations etc after we leave. I've critiqued both the right-wing Vote Leave campaign and the left-wing "Lexit" campaign and found them both sorely lacking in an actual plan of action for how the post-EU economy would be restructured.

Given my left-wing sentiments I really did want the "Lexit" case to be better than the "Vote Leave" case, and in some regards it was. Criticism of the economically hard-right assault on our sovereignty that is the TTIP corporate power grab clearly carries more weight when coming from a left-winger than it does from the kind of right-winger who would normally be orgasmic at the thought of the complete corporate takeover of the United Kingdom.

The right-wing Vote Leave campaign desperately undermined their own case with their absolute refusal to stop repeating their "£350 million a week" lie, even after it's been clearly shown that including all expenditures and excluding all benefits is a shockingly misleading way of determining the cost of a thing.

I genuinely hoped that "Lexit" wouldn't stoop to such appalling lies to sell their campaign, but unfortunately some of them did. The most oft repeated "Lexit" lie is that "workers right are not protected by the EU". This lie isn't just endlessly repeated by "Lexiters" in comments threads, it actually appears in a Left Leave campaign document which states in no uncertain terms that "it is a myth that the EU defends workers".

The claim that the EU has done nothing to protect workers rights is an outright lie. In 1998 the EU introduced the European Working Time Directive in spite of fierce opposition from the UK Tory government during the negotiation phase. The European Working Time Directive prevents your boss from forcing you to work more than 48 hours a week (you still can if you want to, but your boss can't make you) and it also guarantees paid holiday leave (2 million British workers had no paid holiday leave at all before the Working Time Directive came into operation!).

Of course many of our workers' rights were won through the hard work and sacrifices of trade unionists long before the EU even came into existence, but to claim that the EU doesn't protect any workers' rights whatever is just as clear a lie as the right-wing "£350 million a week" claims.

Of course it's possible to argue that the EU hasn't done enough to protect workers rights, they were apparently powerless to intervene when Margaret Thatcher carried out her ideological assault on Britain's heavy industries and the trade unions and they have been seemingly powerless to stop the exponential growth of exploitative Zero Hours and Limited Hours contracts too. However this is a very odd argument for Lexiters to make, because the implication is clearly that the EU should have had more powers to protect our workers' rights, not that we would have been better off outside the European Union.

Perhaps this obvious logical problem with the "the EU hasn't done enough to protect workers' right" line of argument is the reason that some "Lexiters" have instead resorted to repeating the outright lie that the EU doesn't protect any workers' rights whatever?

Whatever the reason that this lie has been adopted by the "Lexit" campaign, it's severely disappointing. It's disappointing because even though I think "Lexiters" are playing with fire by calling for Britain to quit the EU when we have a radically right-wing government in power, I really wanted their case to be superior to the shockingly dishonest rubbish spouted by the right-wing Brexiters. However this oft repeated lie about the EU doing nothing for workers' rights proves that certain members of the Left Leave campaign are just as prepared to lie to get what they want as members of the right-wing Leave campaign are.

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

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Meet the Tory donors: Samworth Brothers

Introduction to the series

This is the first article in a new series called "Meet the Tory donors". Several years ago I wrote a lengthy article providing information on a whole host of Tory donors and how they were being lavished with Peerages, handed huge chunks of the NHS and our education system and even given the opportunity to write new employment legislation for the Tory party to enact! I didn't have anything like as many subscribers back then, and in all honesty the article was so long and dispiriting to read, I'm not surprised that it didn't get shared all that much.

The idea of this new series is to break down the relationship between the Tory party and their donors into more manageable pieces by dealing with them one at a time.

Number One: Samworth Brothers Ltd

Samworth Brothers Ltd is a Leicestershire and Cornwall based food manufacturer. Their most notable products include the Ginsters Pasty range, Walkers Melton Mowbray pork pies and Soreen malt loaf.

Director Mark Samworth has donated at least £585,000 to the Tory party since 2010, including direct donations to the Tory MPs Ken Clarke (£10,000) and Alan Duncan (£7,500).

Life president of the company David Samworth has donated £26,000 to the Tories including another £7,000 in direct donations to Tory MP Alan Duncan.

The company itself also made £32,000 worth of donations to the Tory party between 2002 and 2003.

School privatisation
 
David Samworth is one of an extraordinary number of Tory party donors to have got a nice juicy slice of the publicly funded education system for himself. Unusually he was handed his slice of the education system by Tony Blair's Labour government, long before the Tories put Labour's crackpot academisation scheme into overdrive (with the end goal of the forced privatisation of every state school in England by 2022).

The Samworth Enterprise Academy in Leicester has it's own onsite church(!), but in terms of teaching, it's a devastating failure for the kids who are unlucky enough to end up there. In June 2015 Ofsted classified the school as "inadequate in almost all areas". 

It must suit David Samworth perfectly that the Tory party that he and his family donate so much to are setting up such an unaccountable system, where parents and local councils have no mechanisms to hold the private owners of desperately failing schools like the Samworth Enterprise Academy to account. In the end the only people with the power to eject the owners of failing schools will be the Tory government, who in this case and many others are bankrolled by the very people they're supposed to be overseeing! 

Labour disputes

It's pretty obvious that the Samworths are ideological Tories from the fact that they've poured well over £600,000 into Tory party coffers over the last couple of decades, but their treatment of their labour force provides proof of the fact that they share the Tory ideological contempt towards ordinary working people too.

A serious labour dispute at Samworth Brothers arose when the company sent out-of-the-blue letters to their Midlands workforce of around 4,000 people informing them that the company is planning to begin unilaterally scrapping overtime payments for work on weekends and on bank holidays.

The owners of the company plan to phase out overtime completely by 2020, because as far as they're concerned, work on a Sunday or on a Bank Holiday is exactly the same as work during the normal working week.

This idea that working at unsociable hours and on public holidays is undeserving of more compensation than ordinary weekday work is a very Tory concept indeed.

Take the dispute with the junior doctors that Jeremy Hunt has manufactured in order to push the NHS deeper into crisis. One of the many objections to Hunt's new contract (beyond the primary one that the new contract represents a threat to public safety) is the way that the Tories are trying to redefine chunks of the evening and weekend as sociable hours in order to avoid paying doctors overtime. As far as Jeremy Hunt and the Tories are concerned, for doctors Saturday is a weekday and working at half past nine on a Saturday evening deserves no more pay than working on a weekday morning (which is awfully hypocritical given that Parliament never sits at a weekend and MPs "late sitting" expenses kick in at 7.30!).

Another example of the Tories attacking the weekend is their failed attempt in March 2016 to redefine the Sunday Trading laws in favour of larger shops.

It's absolutely clear that the people running this company are ideological Tories, and that an awful lot of people who buy their products are inadvertently funding the Tory party and their class war agenda.

Offshore ownership structure

The parent company of the Samworth Brothers group is called SFH Investments Unlimited and is registered in the tax haven of Jersey.

Products

• Ginsters (pasties and pies)
• Soreen (malt loaf)
• Walkers and Son (producer of 80% of all Melton Mowbray pies)
• Melton Foods (sandwich supplier)
• Bradgate bakery (sandwiches and salads)
• Blueberry Foods (cake and desert supplier to Tesco and M&S)
• Brooksby Foods (ready meals)
• Kettleby Foods (pies/ready meals)
• Saladworks (ready meals)
• Dickenson and Morris (Ye Olde Pie Shoppe in Melton Mowbray)
• Sci-MX (protein supplements)
• Tamar Foods (pastry supplier to M&S, Tesco, Co-op, Waitrose)
• Walkers Deli (meat products)
• Walkers Sausage Co
• Kensey Foods (desserts including some in the Cadburys range under licence)

What we can do 
  
The obvious course of action is to boycott their products, but if you do decide to do this it's absolutely vital that you contact the company to explain why you won't be buying their products, because the worst way you can hit people like this is to hit them in their wallets.

If tens, or even hundreds of thousands of people begin boycotting Samworth Brothers products then the company might notice a dip in sales and profits, but if tens of thousands of people send the company emails to explain why they are boycotting the company, they'll actually know why their fall in profits is happening.

Here are some contact details:

Samworth Brothers (contact form)
Ginsters Pasties (email, Facebook, Twitter)
Soreen (contact form, Facebook, Twitter)

A properly written email is most likely to have an effect within the company, and posting links or either of these infographics (Ginsters + Soreen) on their Facebook pages are likely to create the biggest social media reaction.

 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.

Welcome to Stasi UK

  

British people generally like to think of the United Kingdom as a benign democratic country, and not some kind of increasingly warped authoritarian state.

Of course British democratic and judicial institutions inspired liberal democracies across the world, but times have moved on since the UK was a relative bastion for free-thought during the 19th Century.Times have also moved on since Britain was a safe haven from authoritarian regimes on the continent (Italy under Mussolini, Hitler's Third Reich, Spain under Franco, The Greek military dictatorship, the Soviet states ...) during the 20th Century.

Nowadays the UK is governed by one of the most right-wing authoritarian regimes in the world, one that is determined to erode the rights of citizens as much as possible and establish powerful state surveillance apparatus that would have made agents of the East German Stasi or the Russian KGB turn green with envy.

Progress so far

New Labour

Even before the Tories came to power in 2010 Tony Blair's New Labour government had changed tack dramatically. From a government that introduced liberal open-government reforms like the Freedom of Information Act and the Human Rights Act, they became one that was determined to erode long established rights and liberties by removing to right to trial by jury, attempting to introduce Guantanamo Bay style long-term detention without charge rules, and their complicity with US kidnap-torture flights (including allowing kidnap-torture flights to fly in and out of UK territories).

The Edward Snowden leaks revealed that mass Internet surveillance in the UK was well under way long before the Tories came to power in 2010.

Secret Courts

As detestable as the late New Labour regime became, their efforts to make the UK a more authoritarian state pale in comparison to what the Tories have been up to for the last six years, (in collusion with the so-called Liberal Democrats between 2010 and 2015).

One of the most shockingly illiberal pieces of legislation the Lib-Dems helped the Tories to pass through parliament was the 2013 Justice and Security Act, which legislated "secret courts" into existence. There was very little mainstream media coverage of this appalling piece of legislation, which introduced a quasi-judicial system where a person could have their fate decided in a courtroom they are not allowed to enter, on charges they are not allowed to know, based on evidence they are not allowed to see.

DRIPA

Another piece of appalling legislation introduced by the Tories (in collusion with the Liberal Democrats and a large number of New Labour MPs too) was DRIPA, which was introduced as "emergency legislation" to allow the secret services to carry on doing the mass trawling of private communications data they had been previously doing illegally for years, with no parliamentary approval or oversight whatever.

Had the Snowden leaks not come out it's inconceivable that such powers would ever have been legislated. The secret services would simply have been allowed to continue trawling private data and hacking whoever they liked with no parliamentary scrutiny whatever.

Grass up your neighbour

One of the most Stasi-like policies of all has been the introduction of "grass up your neighbour" hotlines at the DWP. The idea of encouraging the general public to report their neighbours for suspected benefit fraud is exactly the kind of system used by the East German secret services in order to turn citizens against each other and promote a culture of fear and suspicion.

Creating a network of citizen-spies is appalling enough as it is, but when we get to examining the outcomes of such a system the true horror of it becomes apparent. Of the 1 million+ cases investigated on the basis of tip-offs to "grass up your neighbour" hotlines, more than 85% of them were found to be false accusations, with no evidence of benefit fraud whatever.

The procedure for investigating benefit fraud means that DWP agents can stop all benefits payments, carry out intrusive investigations into people's private circumstances, and make them answer questions in stressful interviews (often under police caution). Well over 880,000 innocent people were subjected to this kind of treatment based on nothing more than being grassed up by nosy neighbours who had no actual evidence of wrongdoing whatever.

The danger of introducing such a "grass up your neighbour" system is that it can be used by bitter vindictive people to trash the lives of personal enemies, or people they just resent out of bitterness or jealously. There were plenty of foul-minded people in East Germany who would make false malicious reports to the Stasi in order to wreck other people's lives, and it's worth wondering how many of the 880,000+ false reports to the DWP were motivated more by vindictive personal animosity than any genuine suspicion of wrongdoing.

What is in the pipeline?

The Snoopers' Charter

The most obvious and immediate Tory policy designed to make the UK a significantly more authoritarian state is Theresa May's Snoopers' Charter, which was slammed by a cross party group of MPs, yet has been redrafted in order to give the police and intelligence services even more draconian powers than were in the previous draft!

The Snoopers' Charter will allow agents of the state to mass trawl the private communications data of millions of innocent people with complete impunity, and it will allow the police to pick through people's browser histories and even hack into their devices without even having to obtain a warrant by providing any kind of evidence of wrongdoing to a judge beforehand.

If the Snoopers' Charter is not defeated, it will mean that the UK will have legislated the most intrusive state surveillance powers in the western world. We will become a country where concepts like the right to privacy and the presumption of innocence will have been relegated to the dustbin of history.

Extremist counter-extremism measures

Theresa May is also pushing through more extremely authoritarian proposals to crack down on our rights and liberties under the guise of countering extremism. The proposed powers under Theresa May's "Extremism Orders" are mind-bogglingly authoritarian. Her proposals would allow the state to revoke people's freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and right to privacy even with no evidence whatever that they've actually committed a crime. A state that gives itself the power to ban people from expressing themselves without presenting a single shred of evidence that they have ever actually broken a law, would be a thoroughly authoritarian one that has actually legislated the Orwellian concept of thought crime into existence.

David Cameron summed up this terrifying Tory attitude that the state has the right to interfere in the lives of law abiding citizens with his post-election statement that "for too long we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens 'as long as you obey the law we will leave you alone". The only possible conclusion from a statement like this is that David Cameron wants the UK to be an actively intolerant society that persecutes people even if they have committed no crime whatever.
   
Scrapping human rights

There should be little mystery as to why the Tories are so desperately keen to scrap our human rights. All sorts of right-wing authoritarian Tory legislation over the last six years conflicts with the 18 rights protected by the European Convention on Human Rights.

If the Tories were to withdraw from the ECHR, the UK would set an appalling precedent as the first western country ever to unilaterally withdraw from a human rights agreement. Such a withdrawal would clearly send a strong signal to appalling dictatorships across the world, that as far as the British government are concerned, human rights are purely optional.

Trashing labour rights

The latest Tory assault on working people is their Trade Union Bill which puts almost impossible turnout stipulations on trade union ballots, without allowing trade unions to modernise their voting procedures in order to actually increase turnouts and make themselves more democratic.

The UK already has some of the most severe anti-trade union laws in the developed world, and the Tories are determined to further crush the ability of working people to come together in solidarity to achieve better working conditions for themselves.

The 50% turnout rule looks as if it has been designed with the express intention of rendering trade union democracy completely unworkable. I mean what other reason would there be for introducing rules that transform an abstention into a stronger vote against strike action than an actual vote against strike action?

If the Tories introduced 50% turnout thresholds for political positions, they wouldn't be such appalling hypocrites, but they have no intention of doing that, because it would render every single Tory PCC, nearly all Tory politicians in local government, all Tory MEPs, several Tory MPs and the (especially hypocritical) Tory Mayor of London unemployed.

As is always the case with the Tories, it's one set of rules for entitlement class, and a completely different set of rules for the plebs.

Silencing critics

One of the hallmarks of repressive authoritarian regimes is that they will not tolerate criticism.

The Tories (with the assistance of the Illiberal Democrats) have already introduced a gagging law to prevent charities, community groups, religious organisations and trade unions from criticising government policy. Now they want to go one step further by banning any organisation that receives government funding (including university research departments) from lobbying the government or criticising government policy (whilst they allow multinational corporations and wealthy Tory party donors to continue influencing government policy to such an extent that they are even invited to draw up their own laws).

Conclusion

The United Kingdom is heading down an extremely dangerous path, yet so many people remain utterly complacent, and like every extremist authoritarian regime in history, there's also a crowd of idiots cheering the Tories every step of the way.

It's as if the British public are so apathetic and ignorant of human history that they can't even imagine that a brutal totalitarian government could ever arise in the UK.

Make no mistake about it. Theresa May is an extremely dangerous right-wing authoritarian. The fact that she's been allowed to cook up one dreadful piece of desperately inhumane and/or severely totalitarian legislation after another, whilst spitting poisonous anti-immigrant rhetoric, for six long years is utterly appalling.

If things continue the way they have been going, the UK will soon have the most authoritarian state surveillance laws in the developed world (with snooping powers that the East German Stasi could only ever have dreamed of), and the rights to free speech and privacy will have gone the same way as the right to a fair trial has already gone.

What we can do about it

Get involved with an organisation that works to protect rights and liberties in the UK and across the world: There are loads, here are just a few: Liberty, War on Want, Open Rights Group, Amnesty International, Privacy International, Statewatch, Article 19.

Write to your MP: It's easy to write to your MP or your other political representatives. As long as you include your full name and address, your MP has a statutory obligation to reply to you. It is helpful to ask a number of specific questions in your correspondence, otherwise they can easily fob you off with a copy n' paste boilerplate reply. Follow this link.

 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.

MORE ARTICLES FROM
 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 
         
The lamentable decline in the standard of public debate
           
David Cameron's Orwellian word games
                     
The hypocritical Tory plan to ruin trade union democracy
       
Dog whistles and dead cats
                             
How the mainstream media frame the political debate
                
Secret Courts and the very Illiberal Democrats
                      

How the mainstream media give George Osborne a free pass
                                
Margaret Thatcher's toxic neoliberal legacies