13 things everyone should know about the ECHR

Priti Patel's Rwanda deportation flight was never actually intended to take off.

It was a £500,000 publicity stunt designed to ramp up the culture war against the European Convention on Human Rights, and the court that protects these rights and liberties.

The Tory ploy was to deliberately try to break the law, in order to claim that the nasty Europeans are preventing us from doing what we want to, and agitate for Britain to leave the jurisdiction of the ECHR.

Given that the UK government is intent on whipping up culture war propaganda against it, here are 13 things that people should know about the ECHR:

It's got nothing to do with the EU

The ECHR has absolutely nothing to do with the EU. It's an independent institution established in 1950.

So all these far-right polemicists shouting "leave means leave" over the Rwanda situation are either thick as mince, or being deliberately misleading.

Churchill's finest legacy

Winston Churchill was a true enigma of a man. A right-wing racist who despised Indians and set soldiers on British workers, but a war leader in the fight against Nazism, and a man who promoted the idea of internationally accepted human rights to prevent the horrors of fascism from happening again.

The development of the ECHR was supported by both Churchill and Labour PM Clement Attlee, meaning anyone who wants to rip Britain out of of the ECHR is trashing the legacies of the favourite 20th Century Prime Ministers of both the right and the left!

Protection from fascism

The ECHR was designed to protect European citizens from fascism, and make sure nothing like the horrors of the Second World War could ever happen again. So you've really got to wonder about the true motivations of any government that wants to drag their country out of it.

The life's work of Johnson's own grandad

Boris Johnson's own grandfather James Fawcett was a member of the ECHR from 1962-1984, serving as its President from 1972-1982. He dedicated his life's work to human rights, and wrote books on international law, and the application of the ECHR.

It's not just an indication of the decline of Fawcett's family lineage that his own grandson is the radical-right philistine who is intent on wrecking his life's work, it's indicative of our national decline too.

For all of our many faults, Britain was once a great nation in some ways, stocked with decent, honest, earnest men like Fawcett who worked for the betterment of humanity.

These days we lift up and celebrate the absolute worst among us, like the bone-idle, incompetent, lying, philandering oaf who is intent on wrecking the life's work of his own grandfather, purely because he knows contemptuously undermining human rights and international law plays well to Britain's depraved hard-right capitalist media.

These days it's all about self-interest, not the betterment of others, and it's a crying shame that we've fallen so far as a nation in just a couple of generations.

Red meat for tabloid-addled reactionaries

It's hard to imagine the warped mindset of the kind of tabloid-addled reactionary who desperately wants to see their own human rights ripped up, purely because they're angry that their beloved Tory government couldn't unlawfully deport a few poor refugees, who they've never even met, and know nothing about.

But this kind of rabidly right-wing ultranationalist reactionary is Johnson's base. The Tories knew they couldn't win elections without attracting the millions who used to vote for UKIP and the BNP, so this policy of destroying our human rights is red meat, intended for their consumption.

ECHR protects British rights

We regularly hear about how the ECHR protects immigrants, by preventing the UK government from defying the law to deport them, but it also protects the rights of British citizens too.

It was thanks to the ECHR that the bans on homosexuality were lifted in Scotland and Northern Ireland; employers were prevented from discriminating against their workers on religious grounds; teachers were banned from brutalising children with corporal punishment; the ban on people in Gibraltar voting in general Elections was lifted; and the multiple rulings to protect the British public from police brutality.

A very British institution

The ECHR was largely drafted by British lawyers, and British judges have always been major players in the institution, with three of Britain's eight ECHR judges having served as president of the court (Nicholas Bratza, Humphrey Waldock, A.D. McNair). 

Only France and Italy out of the other 46 member states have even had two presidents of the court, and many nations have never had a single one.

Leaving would be Putinesque

In all of Europe, only Belarus has never signed up to the ECHR. The only countries to have walked out of it are Greece, after they suffered a violent military coup in 1969 (then re-joined 1974), and then Putin's Russia after the invasion of Ukraine.

Do we really want to join the brutal Papadopoulos Junta and Vlad Putin's Russia as the only European regimes to have torn up their own citizens' European rights?

Crucial to the Irish Peace Process

Boris Johnson has already made his contempt for the Irish Peace Process absolutely clear by barefaced lying that his Brexit deal wasn't going to create a border down the Irish Sea, creating a border down the Irish Sea, and then defying international law with his efforts to rip up the Northern Ireland Protocol after having told everyone it was a great deal, and signing us up to abide by it.

Britain can't quit the ECHR without ripping up the Good Friday Agreement, which stipulates that the UK have the ECHR enforceable in Northern Ireland.

This latest attack on the ECHR demonstrates that Johnson's contempt for the Irish Peace Process knows no bounds.

Internationally accepted rights, or a set of Tory allowances?

The Tories want to tear up the ECHR and replace it with a British "Bill of Rights" which will be drawn up by ministers from the billionaire-bankrolled Tory party!

What kind of idiot wants to have their internationally accepted rights lobbed in the bin, so that the radical-right ghouls Johnson has surrounded himself with can decide what rights and liberties they will and won't allow us to keep?

Know your rights

The first 18 Articles of the ECHR are the most fundamental. Most of the rest relate to technical details of how the court functions. Here are the rights that Boris Johnson and the Tories are seeking to rip up:

Why the British press hate it

Johnson is intent on attacking the ECHR because Britain's rabidly right-wing corporate media outlets hate it.

The main reason they hate it is because of Article 8, which guarantees British citizens the right to privacy, and prevents them from engaging in the phone-hacking and private surveillance scandals that led to the Levenson Inquiry.

They're still furious that they can't hack into our phones, private communications, medical records, etc ... to do stuff like leak gossip about celebrities and their families, smear left-wing and socially progressive figures, and release the private information of dead British soldiers.

Why the Tories hate it

The Tories hate the ECHR for a very similar reason to the right-wing capitalist media; it constrains their ability to make life worse for people.

• Whenever they want to deport immigrants (or black British citizens) they detest having to try to do it in a way that complies with the ECHR rules.

• When they defund the justice system and scrap entitlement to Legal Aid, they know that they're denying people the right to a free and fair trial.

• When they implement mandatory unpaid labour schemes for the unemployed, they know they're trampling over people's right not to be subjected to forced labour.

• When they bring in legislation to erase our ancient British right to participate in non-violent protest, they know they're attacking our rights to free expression, assembly, and association.

They hate the ECHR because it stands in the way of them being the vicious, malicious bastards that they really want to be.

Conclusion

I'm fairly certain that few could read all of this and still conclude that they want the Tories to trample all over Churchill's finest legacy by walking out of the ECHR, to join Belarus and Putin's Russia as Europe's only non-signatories.

You'd have to be the worst kind of simpleton to imagine that Johnson's billionaire-bankrolled Tories are better placed to decide what our fundamental rights and liberties should be, than a Europe-wide panel of human rights advocates and legal experts.

The big problem is that the kind of low-information voter this malicious anti-ECHR rabble-rousing is aimed at doesn't have the intellectual rigour to actually learn about the issue they're being programmed to froth about, or the patience/comprehension ability to read a detailed summary, if they were ever to somehow come across one.

it's bad enough that decades of failing education and exposure to radical-right capitalist media has created such an enormous demographic of reactionary low-information voters, but that the government actively panders to them like this is a national disgrace.

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We're being ruled over by a lawless bunch of Tory thugs

This week both the Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and the Home Secretary Priti Patel have used their Tory party conference speeches to spit venom at “lefty lawyers” and “do-gooders” because they attempt to hold this malicious, lawless shambles of a government to the rule of law.

Meanwhile the Tories are trying to push through three outrageous pieces of legislation through parliament simultaneously, all of which seek to undermine international law, and drastically redefine the powers of agents of the British state to behave lawlessly.

Internal Market Bill

The Internal Market Bill is designed to tear up Boris Johnson’s “Oven Ready” Brexit deal with the EU, within a year of signing it.

Having rushed it through parliament and then hastily signing it off with the EU in January 2020 (to delirious Brexiteer celebrations) this isn’t just a Brexit plan any more, it’s now a signed and sealed international treaty.

For Johnson and the Tories to suddenly turn around and say that the deal they signed is flawed nonsense that has to be ripped up in the faces of the people they just signed it with is an outright affront to common decency, but it’s also an attack on the rule of law, because not only does it involve tearing up a binding international treaty they only just signed, it also severely endangers the Good Friday Agreement.

The Tory Northern Ireland minister Brandon Lewis actually stood up in parliament and admitted that the Internal Market Bill is intended to break international law, and somehow this lawless Tory regime is being allowed to get away with brazenly turning the UK into an international pariah state that reneges on its signed and sealed international commitments.

Overseas Operations Bill

The next outrageously lawless piece of Tory legislation is the Overseas Operations Bill, which seeks to provide British military personnel legal immunity from prosecution for torture, murder, and war crimes, as long as they can cover up what they did for five years.

This despicable effort to effectively legalise torture and war crimes clearly contravenes all kinds of international agreements and accords, most notably the UNCAT, which states that victims of torture are entitled to justice and redress, no matter when the violations occurred.

Aside from the lawlessness of this legislation, it also sets an appalling precedent because if the UK uses domestic legislation to exempt their military personnel from legal accountability for torture and war crimes, why on earth wouldn’t other rogue regimes follow suit?

Additionally, this drive to provide impunity for torturers, murderers, and war criminals within the ranks of the UK armed forces is likely to have severely adverse consequences on the front line, because the push back from opposition combatants is likely to be absolutely fierce if British soldiers are perceived to be a lawless and unaccountable militia who are encouraged by their government to torture, murder civilians, and commit heinous war crimes with promises of legal impunity.

Spy Cops Bill

Then there’s the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Spy Cops) Bill which seeks to give agents of the state extraordinary powers to commit crimes, up to and including rape, torture, and murder, with legal impunity.

We already know that Spy Cops have perpetrated all kinds of outrages whilst spying on all kinds of non-violent campaign groups; they’ve entrapped activists by orchestrating criminal actions themselves. They’ve conducted sexual relationships with their targets, up to the point of raising kids with their victims before hastily disappearing off the scene entirely once their assignment is over; and they’ve even infiltrated groups campaigning against police violence and miscarriages of justice in order to smear them and disrupt their activities.

This new Spy Cops Bill is designed to allow spy cops to do all of the above, and even to commit crimes in order to fit people up, as long as they invent some spurious excuse for why framing an individual (for example by uploading child sexual abuse or terrorist materials onto their computer) is “in the national interest”.

Alarmingly it isn’t just police, military, and secret services operatives the Tories are plotting to give immunity from prosecution for fitting people up, and committing heinous crimes like torture, rape, and murder. The same powers are being given to agents of all kinds of quangos like the Food Standards Agency, the Gambling Commission, the Competition and Markets Authority, and the Environment Agency!

Even if you’re the kind of drooling far-right authoritarian who believes that spy cops should be given immunity from prosecution if they commit forgery, perjury, fraud, rape, torture, or murder in the course of their work, surely you’ve got to be left left wondering why on earth the Tories are so keen to rush through legislation designed to exempt employees from the Food Standards Agency or Gambling Commission from prosecution from engaging in such criminality too.

And it hardly takes a genius to understand what a terrifying assault on the rule of law it is for the Tory government to give spy cops (and all kinds of other state employees) legal immunity from prosecution if they’re caught committing heinous crimes on behalf of the state.

How does the right to a fair trial survive legislation designed to give spy cops legal immunity from prosecution, even if they commit crimes themselves in order to fit up members of activist groups that the UK government has taken a dislike to?

How does the ECHR right to freedom from torture and degrading treatment survive legislation designed to give agents of the British state the power to commit acts of torture and abuse with legal impunity?

Tory lawlessness

All three of these bills are aimed squarely at undermining international law, and giving agents of the British state the power to behave lawlessly.

This sickening combination of radical anti-lawyer rhetoric from leading Tory figures, and all of this deliberately lawless Tory legislation should be terrifying to anyone who considers the rule of law to be one of the essential pillars of democracy.

But let’s not kid ourselves that this tsunami of Tory lawlessness and anti-lawyer rhetoric is something that’s come out of the blue, because there were loads of warnings before the 2019 general election, stretching all the way back to the coalition government era.

⚫ Page 48 of the Tory manifesto that pledged to tear up our human rights and replace them with a set of Tory allowances, and to dramatically reduce the powers of judicial review.

⚫ Johnson and Cummings’ decision to unlawfully suspend parliament in September 2019 in order to evade democratic scrutiny of their hopelessly flawed “Oven Ready” Brexit deal.

⚫ The appointment of Priti Patel as Johnson’s Home Secretary, despite the fact that she was forced to resign in 2017 after getting caught red-handed acting as an agent of a foreign state embedded in the UK government, and her plot to divert funds from the UK overseas aid budget into the illegal Israeli military occupation of the Golan Heights.

⚫ The outright Tory refusal to defend the High Court Judges after the “Enemies of the People” Daily Mail headline, and Theresa May’s subsequent decision to hire the author of that outrageous hit piece as one of her closest political advisers.

⚫ Theresa May’s unlawful and sickeningly racist “Hostile Environment” that led to the systematic persecution of black black British citizens, to the extent of thousands being denied jobs, housing, banking services, social security, and medical treatment, and scores of black British citizens even being deported out of the UK altogether.

⚫ Chris Grayling’s unlawful Tribunal Fees, designed to protect bad bosses by pricing low-income workers out of the justice system, with upfront £1,200 fees if they wanted to seek compensation for their mistreatment at work.

⚫ Iain Duncan Smith’s unlawful forced-unpaid-labour schemes, followed by his bizarre attempt to bypass the legal judgement against his lawless behaviour by retroactively rewriting his botched and unlawful legislation so that it would have made sense had it been written that way at the time, which was also subsequently declared unlawful in the courts.

It’s not like the British public had no warning that handing a Tory government a whopping great parliamentary majority would result in the deliberate destruction of law and order in the United Kingdom.

Anyone who has paid even the slightest attention since 2010 knew exactly what would be on the cards, but millions obviously concluded that the ideologically driven destruction of the rule of law, and Britain’s descent towards the status of lawless far-right pariah state would be a price worth paying in return for whatever (probably imaginary) benefit they thought they’d be getting from handing absolute power to the bone-idle, bigoted liar Johnson, and his cabinet of radically right-wing Tory ghouls.

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What kind of depraved statue-shagger thinks petty vandalism is worse than rape?

I can't believe I'm having to explain this, but petty vandalism is nowhere near as bad as rape.

The Tories have proposed 10 years in jail for people who damage statues and war memorials, which would be a longer sentence than most convicted rapists end up facing.

It's beyond obvious that damaging war memorials is both stupid and extremely counter-productive to whatever cause a person may be protesting, but the idea that it's somehow worse than most categories of rape is utterly absurd.

According to the Sentencing Council guidelines, only rapists who have committed the most serious category one offences face sentencing starting points of of above ten years.

In order for a rape to be classified as a category one offence, meaning a guaranteed sentence of above ten years, the rapist must have been particularly violent or abusive during the rape.

It's beyond absurd to believe that daubing a slogan onto a monument deserves a longer sentence than a category two rape (re-read the factors that determine a category two rape above).

The idea that minor damage to a statue or monument deserves harsher punishment than a crime like rape is the latest manifestation of the depraved Tory mentality of "property above people".

So what if you were violently raped, can't you understand that it's nowhere near as serious as someone daubing a slogan onto a piece of stone!

Even if supporters of this absurd sentencing proposal try to argue that the rape sentencing guidelines should be toughened to make all rape offences carry 10 years+, they're still blatantly anchoring their attitude to rape on the perceived worth of property, and demonstrating their warped attitude that it's a logical and moral stance to attempt to measure the harm a rape victim has suffered in relation to petty vandalism of an object!

Then there are all the outrageous and sickening crimes committed by capitalists and the establishment class that carry no punishment at all.

• Nobody was even prosecuted when HSBC laundered £billions for Mexican drug cartels, Islamist terrorists, and rogue states.

• Nobody has faced prosecution over the dreadful Grenfell Tower inferno that left 72 people dead.

• Nobody has faced criminal proceedings over the fraudulent under-valuation of the Royal Mail property portfolio when the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition flogged it off to their city speculator mates on the cheap.

• Nobody has been jailed for the unlawful arms sales to Saudi Arabia when government ministers knew for a fact that British weapons were being used to commit war crimes in Yemen.

• Nobody has faced prosecution over the unlawfully racist Tory "Hostile Environment" scandal, that saw thousands of black British citizens systematically discriminated against, and scores actually deported to live in exile overseas!

In light of all these free passes to the ruling establishment class over their crimes, only truly depraved minds could support such an absurdly disproportionate proposal to smash down on petty vandalism.

To Labour's shame they've decided to go along with this disproportionate depravity instead of opposing it (or just staying out of it), in the hope that they can appeal to the baying Daily Mail mob and the far-right thugs who rampaged through London at the weekend.

The sad thing is that in Tory Brexit Britain stuff like facts, evidence, morality, proportionality, etc simply don't factor into the equation.

We know that it's a myth that longer sentencing deters crime. We know that it's immoral to jail a petty vandal for longer than a violent rapist. We know this Tory proposal is venal headline-grabbing hard-right idiocy. But the purpose of it was never to make sense.

The ludicrous 10 year proposal is intended to do three things.

First: It's designed to to subvert the mass Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality and systemic racism into a frenzy of extreme-right ultranationalist statue-shagging.

Second: It's meant to distract attention away from the fact that three years after the Grenfell Tower fire, absolutely nobody has been held legally accountable for the inferno (it's absolutely no coincidence that they released this depraved nonsense proposal on the three year anniversary).

Third: It's intended as a trap for social liberals, who will rightly try to argue that 10 years for petty vandalism is massively disproportionate, because the Tories will deliberately misinterpret all of these legitimate concerns as being "soft on" or "in favour of" war memorial vandalism.

Just try to imagine the depravity of people who honestly believes that daubing a slogan onto a piece of stone is deserving of a harsher punishment than violent rape, and realise that this is the mentality of the people that both the Tories and Keir Starmer's Labour are intent on pandering to.

We're in a situation where both main parties are intent on pandering to the vile attitudes of the absolute worst among us, which means that we're in very serious trouble as a nation.


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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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Meet the Tory rape trial saboteur

Meet Ross England, a rape trial saboteur who the Tory party somehow figured to be a fit and proper person to stand as their candidate in the Vale of Glamorgan in the upcoming Welsh Assembly election.

England was appearing at Cardiff Crown Court as a character witness for the accused when he decided to allege that the rape victim had engaged in group sex in the past, despite the judge Stephen Hopkins QC ruling the past sexual history of the victim inadmissible.

Bringing up the allegation of group sex (which the victim outright denies) was clearly a deliberate effort to unfairly prejudice the trial against the victim in order to get his mate off.

The judge was quite rightly infuriated by England's behaviour, responding "Why did you say that? Are you completely stupid? You have managed, singlehandedly, and I have no doubt it was deliberate on your part, to sabotage this trial. Mr England, as far as I am concerned, this matter so far as you are concerned, isn’t ended. I shall be writing personal letters to people who are politically close to you and I hope they take appropriate action. Get out of my court."

The trial was suspended, but England's rapist friend was eventually found guilty at a retrial and sent down for five years.

The victim told BBC Wales "It is completely shocking to me that Ross England would stand up in court and say these things, given that they are untrue ... For him to just blurt that out, proves to me that it was a formulated plan that he and whoever else conjured to try and derail the trial ... I think it was an absolutely deliberate attempt to sabotage the trial."

Amazingly, even after he cost the public a fortune by deliberately collapsing a rape trial, the Tory party decided to select England as one of their political candidates, only suspending him after public anger at his rape trial sabotage tactics became too strong for them to sweep the issue under the carpet.

So next time you hear some Tory politician posturing as if they're "the party of law and order" don't forget that besides slashing 21,000+ police jobs and closing down 600 police stations since 2010, they're also a welcoming home to people who deliberately collapse rape trials to try and help their mate get away with rape!

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13 reasons you'd have to be absolutely cracked to believe the Tories are "the party of law and order"

The Tories absolutely love to pose as "the party of law and order" so in this article I'm going to detail the policies they've pursued in relation to policing and the justice system since 2010 (much of it wilfully enabled by their Lib-Dem chums).

21,000+ police jobs axed: 

You'd have to have been living under a rock for the last decade not to have heard about the Tories austerity cuts to the police force, not just slashing all those jobs, but shutting down 600 police stations, and absolutely gutting police budgets too.

The resulting violent crime wave and surge in gang culture was widely predicted as they were making these cuts, but Theresa May and the Tories dismissed all the experts' warnings about their police cuts agenda as "crying wolf" and "scare-mongering".

Privatised front line policing:

If you ask the British public about privatisation of public services, the things they're most vehemently opposed to are privatisation of the NHS, schools, military, and police.

Just 4% of people who expressed an opinion thought that privatisation of the police sounds like a good idea.

This public revulsion at the idea didn't stop the Tories and their Lib-Dem sidekicks privatising a bunch of front line police services (and other massive swathes of the criminal justice system) during the austerity coalition.

This police privatisation frenzy included a £200 million deal for G4S to take over Lincolnshire police (G4S are the useless tossers who screwed up the 2012 Olympic security preparations and had to be bailed out at the public expense by drafting in off duty army and police officers to clear up their mess - more on them later).

Forensic Science Service privatisation:

During the austerity coalition the Tories and Lib-Dems decided to take the extraordinary step of privatising police forensic science services, meaning crucial stuff like the processing of crime scene samples and DNA evidence was handed over to a bunch of profiteering private corporations.

The result was ridiculously predictable: Chaos, delays, mix-ups, and deliberately tampered evidence.

One private forensics lab in Manchester was caught manipulating forensic results, which meant 10,000 cases, including rape and murder cases, had to be reinvestigated. Nobody has gone to jail over this outrageous scandal.

Nobody charged in 91% of crimes: 

It beggars belief when the Tories do their "tough on crime" posturing to whip up their right-wing authoritarian base.

Their unprecedented police cuts since 2010 mean there are fewer police per head of population than at any time since the 1970s, with an ever growing percentage of crimes involving complex and time consuming IT investigations.

Is it any wonder that such a vast percentage of crimes go entirely unpunished these days?

How on earth is it possible to pretend to be "tough on crime" when you're letting more criminals get away with it than ever?

Dodgy facial recognition:

The Tories have been extremely keen to burn mountains of cash on unproven facial recognition technology instead of actively tackling the staggering backlog of uncharged crimes they've created.

These trials have resulted in farcical levels of inaccuracy of up to 98% of people being identified as the wrong person.

They have however built up a facial recognition database of an estimated 16-19 million people, many of whom have never been charged with a crime in their lives, despite a high court ruling that the police have no right to retain such images. 

Who cares about ensuring the police comply with the law eh?

The tagging fraud:

In 2013 two private outsourcing contractors (Serco and G4S) were caught running two of the biggest frauds against the British public finances ever recorded. The fraud involved submitting thousands of fake invoices for the monitoring the electronic tags of offenders, many of whom were made up, living abroad, or even dead!

All these companies had to do was pay back what they stole (£89 million stolen by Serco, and £109 million stolen by G4S) and nobody ever went to jail for it.

In fact, within a few years the Tories brought G4S back in to run another £25 million electronic tagging contract, so as long as you're stealing out of the public purse, the Tories are keen to ensure that crime does pay!

Privatised prisons:

Most of the Tory prison privatisation agenda went on below the radar during the Tory/Lib-Dem austerity coalition. The media only really started to notice when shocking mismanagement and extraordinary staff shortages in privatised prisons like HMP Birmingham led to massive prison riots.

Surprise, surprise, the private operators that reduced HMP Birmingham to such absolute chaos they had their contract to run it rescinded were our old friends G4S.

Legal Aid cuts:

One of the most devastating Tory/Lib-Dem "reforms" to the criminal justice system was their devastation of the Legal Aid budget, which has caused all kinds of problems by denying legal representation to those unable to afford it.

Legal Aid was originally introduced in order to level the scales ever so slightly by helping those who couldn't afford legal representation. The system was still massively stacked in favour of those who could afford to hire teams of expensive lawyers, but at least the poor had any legal representation at all.

The Tories couldn't abide this so they absolutely vandalised the Legal Aid system, leaving huge numbers of people without legal representation from family courts, through victims of crimes, to appeals tribunals against obscene "fit for work" judgements and ridiculously unjustifiable welfare sanctions.

Instead people are left to represent themselves, resulting in huge amounts of wasted court time because they don't even understand the absolute basics of legal proceedings.

It's impossible to explain the absolute horror and injustice of these Legal Aid cuts in just a few paragraphs. Here are some more links for further reading (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).

Unlawful tribunal fees:

In 2013 the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition introduced upfront £1,200 Tribunal Fees designed to price low income workers out of the justice system and prevent them from seeking compensation from bad bosses who had abused and/or exploited them.

In 2017 these fees were declared unlawful by the Supreme Court because of the unfair barrier to justice they so obviously represented. This ruling necessitated the reimbursement of everyone who had paid these "barrier to justice" fees, but nothing could be done to reimburse those who were priced out of the justice system between 2013 and 2017. They just had to swallow the fact that they'd been unlawfully denied the right to seek compensation from their bad bosses by a party that loves to style itself as "the party of law and order"!

Privatised Probation Service:

Perhaps the most devastating Tory reform to the justice system of all was their unbelievably dangerous and shambolic privatisation of the Probation Service.

Somehow the Tories and their Lib-Dem sidekicks decided that it would be a fabulous idea to carve the probation system open for privatisation, leaving only the most serious (and costly) cases in public hands.

police, crime experts, and legal professionals all warned that handing probation services over to a bunch of corporate regional monopolies would represent a danger to the public, but the Tories and Lib-Dems did it anyway, because ideology apparently trumps evidence.

Then lo and behold, the probation system collapsed into chaos, mass resignations of experienced staff, soaring recidivism rates, virtually unsupervised offenders, unacceptable risks with public money, and clearing up the mess ended up costing a whopping £500 million.

Abolition of choice:

One of the most extraordinary assaults on the criminal justice system during the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition was the move to scrap the right for criminal defendants to choose their own solicitor, instead being assigned one from a government approved list of mega-contractors including the usual suspects like Serco, G4S, and Capita as well as Eddie Stobart (yes the haulage firm).

This new policy would have driven hundreds of small and specialist legal firms out of business by preventing potential clients from choosing a local or specialist firm, because they've been automatically assigned representation by one of the corporate giants who bid for the regional monopoly in their area.

Thankfully this ludicrous nonsense was eventually scrapped, but the fact that it was even proposed is horrifying. There are enough ludicrous financial conflicts of interest with private companies running front line policing, forensic science, private prisons, the probation system, and electronic tagging, without them providing legal services to the people they'd profit from in their private jails if they were found guilty!

The prison book ban:

If we look back at the four previous justice system disasters, one man's fingerprints are all over every single one of them; the spectacularly incompetent Chris Grayling.

Another one of Grayling's brainwaves was the policy of banning books in prisons.

Anyone with the faintest appreciation of the fact that prisons need to rehabilitate as well as punish, must see that banning books is the kind of venal authoritarian nonsense of dictatorships, and that book bans are obviously an impediment to rehabilitation.

Like Grayling's shambolic effort to abolish legal aid choice, and his spectacularly failed probation system privatisation, and his unlawful tribunal fees, his ridiculous book ban was eventually scrapped too, after it was ruled unlawful.

The fact that the Tories allowed a serial incompetent like Chris Grayling anywhere near the justice system is proof of their utter contempt for "law and order".

The hiring 20,000 police deception:

Even when the Tories claim to be helping the police by hiring "another 20,000 police starting right now", it's an absurd deception.

The natural attrition rate of police retiring, changing careers, or quitting in exasperation at the under-funded chaos they're working in, means that the UK will need around an additional 20,000 police officers over the next three years just to keep the numbers where they are.

The Tories have dressed this police hiring process up as some kind of marvellous recruitment drive, but in reality they're doing little more than the bare minimum to prevent police numbers collapsing even further.

Even if nobody retired from the police for the next three years, where would all the extra police be placed given the fact the Tories have closed down over 600 police stations since 2010, and how would their operations be funded given that the current force is reduced to the absolute bare bones after nine years of ruinous Tory austerity cuts?

The problem of course is that there are an awful lot of dangerously under-informed dupes out there who still, despite all of the vandalism detailed in this article, imagine the Tories to be "the party of law and order", and willingly believe their ridiculous false promises to restore the police services they've just spent the last nine years deliberately wrecking.

Maybe reading this article would cure them of their delusion, or maybe they'd simply refuse to read it because they don't want their political preconceptions challenged in any way.

All we can do is try, and hope that they're not so far gone that they outright refuse to engage with information that clashes with their Tory tribalist worldview.

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