A compendium of Tory corruption

Some people don't seem to grasp the sheer scale of Tory corruption, so here are details of just a fraction of what we already know about (with sources):

🔵 Tory MP Owen Paterson was caught red-handed breaking the ministerial code of conduct by lobbying for his employers within government. Randox were paying Paterson £100,000 per year, he sat in on ministerial meetings about the company, and they ended up getting £600 million in Covid contracts. 

🔵 A cross-party committee of MPs found that Paterson had brazenly defied the rules, and ordered him to serve a 30 day suspension from parliament. Instead of accepting the findings of the Paterson investigation Boris Johnson ordered Tory MPs to vote through controversial legislation designed to tear down the parliamentary standards authority, and let Paterson off scot free!

🔵 Tory leader of the House of Commons Jacob Rees-Mogg was one of the leading advocates of using the Owen Paterson scandal as an excuse to demolish the parliamentary standards authority. In 2018 Rees-Mogg used his company Saliston to lend himself almost £6 million at significantly below the market rate of interest, and he didn't even bother to declare these loans on the register of MPs interests (no wonder he was so keen to tear down the parliamentary standards authority!).

🔵 Boris Johnson has been caught up in multiple scandals himself, dating back to before he even became Prime Minister. There was the £126,000 in public cash paid to his mistress Jennifer Arcuri without any declaration of their relationship as one of Johnson's registered interests; the dodgy loan he received to decorate his Downing Street flat; his false declaration of a luxury holiday in Mustique; and his recent holiday in the luxury Spanish villa owned by a tax-dodging company operated by former Tory MP Zac Goldsmith, who Johnson gifted a lifetime peerage in the unelected House of Lords after he lost his parliamentary seat in the 2019 General Election. 

🔵 On the subject of the House of Lords, all sixteen of the Tory Party's former treasurers over the last seven years have been handed unelected lifetime peerages in the House of Lords, after having donated over £3 million each to the Tory operation! 

🔵 Tory politicians have been handing out untendered PPE contracts like sweeties, to such an extent that former Health Secretary Matt Hancock's former pub landlord, and his dad's mate, and his sister even got lucrative £multi-million contracts. Hancock 'accidentally' failed to include his 20% stake in his sister's PPE contract winning company on the register of MPs interests! 

🔵 The Tory government was found to have broken the law in handing a £560,000 coronavirus contract to former colleagues of Tory minister Michael Gove and Boris Johnson's ex-adviser Dominic Cummings.

🔵 Another of the major winners of this no-tender PPE bonanza was Meller Designs, which was a fashion designer until they bagged £160 million worth of PPE contracts, boosting their annual profits from £144k to £13 million. The owner is a regular Tory Party donor called David Meller, who personally lobbied the unelected Tory minister James Bethell for PPE contracts. 

🔵 P14 Medical was turned from a failing company into an absolute cash cow via a whopping £276 million in untendered PPE contracts. The owner Steve Dechan, a Tory party councillor in Stroud, used his profits from the Tory PPE bonanza to buy himself a luxurious £1.5 million country house in the Cotswolds. 

🔵 A company called Clipper Logistics got in on the untendered PPE bonanza with a £1.3 million contract. No surprise that the owner of the company is a major Tory Party donor called Steve Parkin. 

🔵 Another major Tory donor called Haraldur Agustsson bagged over £100 million worth of untendered PPE contracts across his companies Globus Shetland and Alpha Solway. 

🔵 After raking in over £1 billion in untendered coronavirus contracts, Tory-linked firms repaid the favour by kicking back a small percentage of their gains via £615,000 in donations to the Tory party!

The Tory minister who oversaw so many of the astounding no-tender PPE contracts was the unelected House of Lords stooge James Bethell who failed to declare 27 meetings with private health companies that went on to rake in over £1 billion in untendered covid contracts and then made up loads of nonsensical and contradictory excuses as to why he couldn't hand over his phone after he was caught red-handed using private WhatsApp chats to conduct government business.

🔵 The Tory government has pumped an astonishing £37 billion into the privatised shambles that is their Test and Trace operation, which has become the largest publicly funded corporate feeding frenzy in British medical history. It's been hit by ballooning costs, missed targets, 600 million lost covid tests, and scandalously high consultancy fees. The Public Accounts Committee have slammed it as an unimaginable waste of money that's had "no clear impact". No worries for Dido Harding who has presided over this absolute shambles, because she's married to the government's "anti-corruption tsar", Tory MP John Penrose!

🔵 The corporate outsourcing giant Serco have been lavished with literally hundreds of millions of pounds worth of Test and Trace contracts. Their CEO is Rupert Soames, brother of former Tory MP Nicholas, and grandson of Winston Churchill!

🔵 Former Tory DWP minister Iain Duncan Smith got in on the private medical pilfering, chairing a government taskforce that produced a report advising the government to give the green light to non-alcoholic hand gel, while earning a £25,000 per year salary from Britain's largest producer of non-alcoholic hand gel (a salary he forgot to declare as an interest in the report). 

🔵 More than a quarter of Tory MPs use the practice of second-jobbing in order to boost their salary of £82,000 (plus lavish expenses).

🔵 In 2015 the Tory government scrapped the requirement that MPs who take second jobs register their employment contracts with parliamentary authorities, which means that the employment details of every single one of the second-jobbing MPs across parliament are secret.

🔵 Perhaps the most egregious Tory moonlighting MP is Ben Bradley who claims salaries for 60 hours per week on top of his MPs duties. The average MP works 69 hours a week, so if Bradley's not shirking his responsibilities as an MP, we're expected to believe that he's putting in 129 hours a week at work, leaving him less than five and a half hours per day for sleeping, eating, travel, leisure, shopping, personal hygiene, and family life. All combined! 

🔵 Tory MP Mark Pawsey has a moonlighting £30,000 per year second job as chairman of the Foodservice Packaging Association. He leads Westminster’s All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Packaging Manufacturing Industry (no conflict of interests there eh?), and he's repeatedly spoken during parliamentary debates to criticise regulation of the food packaging industry, and to decry efforts to make retailers and manufacturers contribute more to the cost of recycling their plastic waste.

🔵 Tory MP Alun Cairns was hired on a lucrative £15,000 salary (more than £200 per hour) by a company that was part of a consortium that was awarded a £10 million coronavirus contract the following month.

🔵 More than 50 former Tory ministers have taken up private sector jobs in sectors they covered during their time as government ministers, many of them are still in parliament as MPs, or in the vast unelected crony club that is the House of Lords.

🔵 Tory Minister Nadhim Zahawi banked £1.3million from oil company Gulf Keystone Petroleum while working as an MP, but kept his second job earnings secret via a parliamentary loophole that allowed him to avoid declaring the payments by diverting them through a consultancy company he established with his wife.

🔵 At least 90 Tory MPs also boost their incomes by over £10,000 per year as private landlords, and many of these exploitative landlord MPs have repeatedly voted against proposals to regulate the private rental sector, and 72 of these landlord-MPs voted down legislation to require landlords to make private rented accommodation "fit for human habitation".

🔵 34 Tory MPs have accepted political donations from firms linked to the Russian oligarch Viktor Fedotov, whose dodgy dealings were revealed in the Pandora Papers. Not a single one of these donations has been returned. 

🔵 The Pandora Papers also revealed that the unelected Tory lord Paul Deighton, a former government minister, had failed to declare a load of his secret offshore investments.

🔵 Former Attorney General Geoffrey Cox has been raking in literally £millions for legal consultancy work, which included representing the British Virgin Islands tax haven, while arguing against closing tax loopholes in parliament! 

🔵 In 2004 Cox bought a £535,000 Battersea flat, relying on public funds to pay his £1,750 a month mortgage repayments. He now rents the property out for about £1,000 a week, living in a different London flat so he can claim £1,900 a month in public cash to pay the rent! 

🔵 Former Prime Minister David Cameron was caught lobbying the Tory government on behalf of a company called Greensill Capital, who were paying him absolutely vast consultancy fees. The government then over-rode their own £50 million limit on emergency Covid loans to award Greensill a whopping £400 million, all of which was loaned to companies associated with billionaire Tory-donor Sanjeev Gupta. Greensill went bankrupt a matter of months later! 

🔵 Tory MPs have been taking thousands of pounds worth of freebies and junkets from gambling companies and the gambling lobby then making pro-gambling statements in parliament and producing pro-gambling advertorials for websites like ConservativeHome. Probably the worst offender is Tory MP Laurence Robertson who earns £24,000 per year (at £200 per hour) as a gambling lobbyist who argued against stronger regulation of the gambling industry in parliament, then had the barefaced cheek to claim that there was no conflict of interest. 

🔵 The leader of the Scottish Conservatives Douglas Ross "forgot" to declare £28,000 in earnings from his second job, but insists that it's all just a big mistake.

This lot is just the visible tip of the Tory corruption iceberg!

If you're aware of any other Tory corruption scandals, feel free to add details in the comments.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

OR

Tory Brexit is still an absolute shambles

Apparently the British negotiating team still had their papers in their bags when the photo was taken, but the confident Europeans with their stacks of briefing papers sitting opposite the Brits armed only with inane grins and misplaced confidence is a powerful visual metaphor for how the Brexit process is going so far.

The EU negotiating team have finalised and published detailed Brexit position papers on a whole range of different aspects of the Brexit negotiations, and their stance is universally backed by the 27 remaining EU states, which is no mean feat given that they range from the extreme-right governments in Poland and Hungary all the way through to Syriza in Greece and the Communist-backed government in Portugal).

It's a national embarrassment to Britain that our negotiating team is so chaotic. Not only are the British public still deeply divided on whether Brexit should even be going ahead after all the lies and dodgy dealings during the referendum campaign, the Tories who have been charged with delivering Brexit are all pulling in different directions.

Tory Brexit is turning out to be just as chaotic and damaging as almost all of the economic and international law experts predicted during the rushed referendum debate in 2016.

The problem isn't just that the Tories didn't even draw up a contingency plan for what to do in case David Cameron's EU referendum gamble backfired, it's that the governing party is still deeply divided on what they want to achieve out of the Brexit process.

The Tories aren't just split between two camps any more like they used to be (Europhobes and Europhiles) they've fractured into all kinds of factions, each arguing for their own agendas under Theresa May's weak leadership, and agreeing on one thing only, that the opposition parties and devolved parliaments should be given as little influence over the Brexit process as possible.

On Sunday 16th July the Tory Chancellor Philip Hammond made the extraordinary admission that there are some members of the cabinet who don't agree with his stance (brazenly one he just nicked off Labour) that protecting British jobs and the UK economy should be the first priorities of the Brexit negotiations.

We can have a good guess as to who these cabinet members are who would sacrifice other people's jobs and living standards to secure the hard-right extreme Brexit they crave. They're clearly the same ones who talked Theresa May into adopting her toddler tantrum Brexit strategy of endlessly repeating her give us exactly what we want or we'll walk away with nothing threats, that do nothing but massively increase the likelihood of an extreme "no deal" Brexit.

There's ginning David Davis, who is so clearly out of his depth it would be hilarious if our national reputation and the living standards of millions weren't hanging on his ability to suddenly and miraculously develop some basic levels of competence.

There's Boris Johnson who seems to have carte blanche to just make up whatever positions he likes, including telling the EU to "go whistle" during a parliamentary debate, for which he received the usual mild rebuke and no further action for what would be firing/resignation offences under the leadership of anyone but the weakest of Prime Ministers.

Then there are the absolutely clueless gibberish-spewing buffoons like Owen Paterson, who actually claimed that the UK could obtain the benefits of the Single Market by imposing import tariffs on EU produce, meaning he's apparently unaware that the main benefit of the Single Market is the lack of import/export tariffs!

Then there are the reluctant Brexiters, who know perfectly well that Brexit is going to be a social and economic catastrophe for the UK, and campaigned against it during the referendum debate, but who are now clearly prioritising the interests of the Tory party way above the nation as a whole by supporting a policy that they know will do severe long-term harm to the economy and to the national reputation.

Last of all is the almost eradicated Europhile faction which is now represented in the House of Commons by the solitary backbench figure of Ken Clarke (the only Tory MP to vote against invoking Article 50).

The source of this chaos is obviously Theresa May's feeble directionless leadership.

Instead of defining a clear position and making sure her cabinet members stick to it, she's allowing them to say whatever the hell they like, and contradict each other time and again, without taking any real disciplinary action whatever, even when they come out with outrageously confusing and counterproductive gibberish.

Either the Tory cabinet ministers are continually bickering and contradicting one another because they're as unclear about the official Brexit negotiating position as the rest of us are, or they do actually know what the supposed endgame is, but they're got such contempt for their own party leader that they feel free to defy her by claiming whatever they like with total impunity.

Whatever the causes of this chaos, disunity and infighting within Theresa May's cabinet, it's clearly an absolute embarrassment to the UK that while 27 politically diverse nations have come together to formulate clear, timely and transparent negotiating positions after having had Brexit thrust upon them, the Tory party that brought us Brexit in the first place are so shockingly disunited.

I know "I told you so" is not a good look, but anyone who imagined that the fanatical hard-right fringe of the Tory party would be capable of delivering anything but an absolute shambles must at least be feeling their misplaced faith evaporating away quite quickly by now.

These hard-right Europhobes had four whole decades of whinging to actually develop a plan for getting out of the EU, but incredibly they're still too busy fighting and bickering amongst themselves to focus on the job that they created for themselves, even an entire year after the referendum result, and with the Article 50 clock ticking away.

Options

There are four main options for the UK.

1. Just muddle along and pretend that Theresa May and the absolutely chaotic party she's so demonstrably failing to lead aren't slow-marching us off an economic cliff until the ground begins actually crumbling away beneath our feet. 

2. Demand a more inclusive Brexit that at least offers the opposition parties and devolved governments some proper influence over the UK's negotiating objectives (highly unlikely with a wannabe tyrant like Theresa May still clinging desperately to power). 

3. Demand a second referendum on the final Brexit terms. Whether this would act as a safeguard against Theresa May doing a catastrophic "no deal" strop would depend entirely on the EU, since it's up to them whether they would accept the revocation of Article 50 in the event of a "please stop this madness now" referendum vote. 

4. Demand another General Election, in which Labour would almost certainly make significant gains, either winning a majority, or taking enough Tory seats to form a progressive coalition. It would be unlikely that such a move would be enough to stop Brexit entirely, but at least it would hand the task of sorting out the mess to Keir Starmer QC, who is much more qualified for such a vital job than bumbling David Davis.

Obviously none of these options are ideal, but then we're the ones who voted to put ourselves in this ridiculous position last year, so we're just going to have to own the consequences. 

Obviously the first option is the worst of the lot, but unless there's some concerted effort to stop it going this way, the cliff edge is clearly the direction of travel.

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

OR

Theresa May just told an enormous lie about the EU referendum campaign

Not only was Theresa May's Brexit speech rammed full of inherently contradictory nonsense, she also told a glaring outright lie to the British public.

In an attempt to justify her decision to drag the UK out of the Single Market she made the extraordinary revisionist claim that Brexiters had campaigned on a platform of quitting the single market all along. Here's exactly what she said:

"Both sides in the referendum campaign made it clear that a vote to leave the EU would be a vote to leave the Single Market." [source]

Here are a few reminders of what numerous Brexiters were actually saying before the EU referendum debate in order to hoodwink people into voting Leave.

"Only a madman would actually leave the market" - Owen Paterson, Tory Vote Leave campaigner

"Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market" - Daniel Hannan, Tory Vote Leave campaigner

"There's a free trade zone from Iceland to the Russian border and Britain will still be part of it after we vote leave." - Chris Grayling, Tory Brexit campaigner and current member of Theresa May's own cabinet!

"There is no question about it, Britain will still have access to the single market after we vote leave" - Matthew Elliot, chief executive of the Vote Leave campaign

"Britain will stay in the single market whatever happens" - Pete North, pro-Brexit blogger

Aside from numerous direct Brexiter claims that Britain should remain part of the single market, there were also a load of Brexiter claims that Britain should follow the Norway/Switzerland model, of existing outside the EU but having access to the Single Market. Here are some examples:

"Increasingly, the Norway option looks the best for the UK" - Arron Banks, Leave.EU founder and massive UKIP bankroller

"Wouldn’t it be terrible if we were really like Norway and Switzerland? Really? They’re rich. They’re happy. They’re self-governing" - Nigel Farage, Leave.EU campaigner and UKIP leader at the time

Norway, Switzerland, all of these countries have complete free trade with the EU, and by the way, I can't help noticing that they're doing pretty well." - Daniel Hannan, Tory Vote Leave campaigner

Of course there were always Brexit extremists who consistently argued the case that Britain should commit economic self-harm by quitting the Single Market, but Theresa May's attempt to claim that all leave campaigners "made it clear that a vote to leave the EU would be a vote to leave the Single Market" is an absolutely transparent lie.

Still. If anything at all has been proven by Brexit, it's that Brexit supporters are generally more than happy to be repeatedly and egregiously lied to.

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

OR

Who are the real extremists?

Theresa May's plan to curtail the freedom of speech of people who have committed no crime are an affront to democracy, an affront to the concept of open justice, and an affront to reason too.

Background

It's not like we haven't had sufficient warning that the Tories are intent on over-writing the foundations of our justice system with draconian and grotesquely illiberal legislation.

In 2013 I was one of many to speak out against the imposition of Kafkaesque Secret Courts, where a person can have their fate decided in secret, in a courtroom that they are not allowed to enter, on charges that they are not allowed to know, based on evidence that they are not allowed to see. This bill was so right-wing and authoritarian that even the Daily Mail took an editorial stance against it! "Secret Courts" became law in 2013 thanks to Liberal Democrat support. How they can continue call themselves "liberal" after supporting such a brazen attack on the concept of open democracy with their votes is beyond me.

Another example of this utter Tory contempt for the rule of law was Iain Duncan Smith's retroactive legislation designed to stick two fingers up at the judges who had dared rule his unpaid forced labour schemes for the unemployed to be unlawful. This legislation was rushed through parliament in a single day thanks to the complicity of the Labour party leadership, who ordered their MPs to abstain on all of the votes to in order to let it slide through with as little scrutiny as possible. A (short) list of the honorable Labour rebels who defied the party leadership to vote against this monstrosity can be seen here.

Yet another example of their utter contempt for the rule of law is a July 2014 piece of legislation called DRIP, which was also rushed through as "emergency legislation" once again with the complicity of the majority of Liberal Democrats and the Labour Party MPs. DRIP is designed to allow the overbearing and invasive surveillance state to continue mass trawling and intercepting the private communications data of countless millions of innocent people with complete impunity.

Thought Crime

Theresa May's draconian new project is to impose harsh restrictions on the freedoms of people who have committed no crime. Essentially it is a plan to legislate "thought crime" into British law.

Under Theresa May's proposed Extremism Orders, the Tories plan to award themselves the power to block people from speaking in public places or posting anything except government pre-approved content on the Internet. In order for them to curtail people's free speech so dramatically, they don't want to have to provide any evidence of wrongdoing whatever, they'd just have to claim a reasonable belief that the individual may disrupt democracy, incite racial or religious hatred, or cause public disorder at some future date.

The two key terms are the ones I've highlighted in bold, both of them remain extremely loosely defined.

What on earth could constitute a "reasonable belief" that an individual will commit a crime in the future, despite absolutely no evidence of criminal behaviour or wrongdoing of any kind in the present or the past? In my view, the pre-emptive assumption that a law abiding person is certain to commit some future crime should be defined as an entirely unreasonable belief.

The other loosely defined term is "disrupt democracy". Presumably anyone who dares stand up and take direct action against the government could be defined as a "democracy disruptor"? How about anyone who dares speak out against the government? Are they to be found guilty of "disrupting democracy" too?

The "disrupt democracy" caveat in this proposal brings to mind the accusation by the former environment secretary Owen Paterson that email a politician campaigns organised by protest groups like 38 Degrees are acts of "cyber-terrorism". Could signing a petition against the government be enough to get you banned from speaking in public and subjected to pre-moderation before you're allowed to post comments on the Internet?

These rules are so draconian and illiberal that it's not even fair to call them "thought crime" because the government wouldn't even have to prove that you were thinking about causing trouble, they would just have to claim that they have a reasonable suspicion that you may think about causing trouble at some unspecified future date.

Function Creep

Theresa May and the Tories have made a big hoo-ha out of linking these proposals with Islamist extremists, convenient bogeymen to allow them to propose the complete destruction of the ancient British right to a fair trial in which we are supposed to be presumed innocent until proven guilty.

Tory Secret Courts legislation has already got rid of the fair trial bit, and Theresa May's latest proposals are designed to do away with the presumption of innocence and the burden of proof bits too.

Once these protections have been casually over-written with draconian new laws, you'd have to be completely ignorant of the phenomenon of function creep to blithely imagine that these new rules would only ever be used against the likes of radical Islamist bogeymen.

To make such a naive assumption, you'd also have to be spectacularly ignorant of how the UK surveillance state has gone completely out of control. You'd have to be ignorant of the fact that the police allowed operatives to form relationships with and impregnate law abiding environmental protesters, before doing a disappearing act, leaving the women holding the baby without a penny in child support and not a hope of tracking down the father because they had been hiding behind the stolen identities of dead children. You'd have to be ignorant of the fact that the GCHQ has rolled out countless data stealing programmes without the faintest hint of parliamentary scrutiny, including one that hacked into Yahoo chat and stole tens of thousands of screengrabs from the sexually explicit webchats of completely innocent people.

These things are not made up, click the green links if you don't believe me.

You'd have to be a hopelessly naive idiot to believe that legislation will be passed to revoke our long-standing right to a fair trial in which we are to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, but that these new rules will only ever be used against other people, namely Islamist bogeymen, not you or I. 

New Labour

As with so many other of the outrageous things this Tory led government has perpetrated against the British public, the roots of these horrible policies can be traced back to the previous Labour administration. 

Labour rid us of the right to a trial by jury, with Secret Courts the Tories have gone much further by stripping us of the right to be tried in an open court, and even the right to know the charges against us.

The decision to designate a geographic zone around parliament where free speech and public protest would not be tolerated is a clear precursor of these plans to try to designate the rest of the United Kingdom (and the whole of the Internet) as zones where the right to free speech and public protest can be curtailed by the UK government, without the slightest evidence of actual wrongdoing.

Labour are not to blame for the current appalling proposals, but the authoritarian streak that runs through the Labour party has certainly created the political environment where such blatantly totalitarian legislation could ever even have been proposed.

Human Rights

Theresa May's announcement of these draconian new powers coincided with a strong reaffirmation that they intend to scrap the European Human Rights Act. The people who support this attack on our human rights are the worst kind of tabloid indoctrinated imbeciles.

To celebrate the scrapping of your own human rights, you'd have to be the kind of person who thinks along the lines of "if criminals have human rights, then I don't bloody want any". To think that rights belong to other (nasty) people like murderous Islamist fanatics or paedophiles, and refuse to see human rights as an issue that affects your own life too, you'd have to be the kind of infinitely gullible buffoon who is a danger to themself, and a danger for the rest of us.

Every totalitarian regime in history has had a crowd of celebrating idiots behind them.

The real reasons that the Tories want to scrap as many of our rights as they can get away with, is that our human rights are a barrier to them creating the dystopian nightmare they're after designing.

Here are a few examples of how some of our 18 European Human Rights conflict with Tory party policy:

Article 3 - Torture: There is strong case to be made that Iain Duncan Smith's treatment of the mentally disabled is in breech of this convention prohibiting "inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment". The UK courts have ruled unlawful the practice of forcing the severely mentally disabled to collect evidence of their own disability under threat of financial destitution, yet Iain Duncan Smith has completely ignored these judgments and carried on with the practice regardless. The Tories are intent on scrapping this right to protection from inhuman or degrading treatment before this case ever reaches the European Court. 

Article 4 - Servitude: There is a case to be made that Iain Duncan Smith's unpaid labour extraction schemes, administered under the constant threat of absolute destitution, are in breech of the convention against forced labour. The Tories are intent on scrapping this right to protection from servitude before such a case is ever tested in Europe. 

Article 6 - Fair Trial: The introduction of Secret Courts seem to be a very clear violation of the right to a fair trial, which enshrines the right to a public hearing and the right to a presumption of innocence. The Tories can't have failed to notice that their rules enshrining Soviet style secret justice proceedings in UK courtrooms clash badly with our European Human Rights.

Article 7 - Retroactivity: Remember the retroactive law that was rushed through parliament in a single day in order to rob thousands of people of the compensation they should have been due, after being unlawfully subjected to Iain Duncan Smith's forced labour schemes? The Tories have no objection at all to the practice of retroactively changing the legal status of past events, and our European Human Rights are an obstacle to this practice that they intend to demolish. 

Article 8 - Privacy: The actions of the UK surveillance state (as outlined above) clearly conflict with our right to respect for one's private and family life, home and correspondence. 

Article 10 - Expression: Theresa May's draconian new powers to seriously curtail the right to speak freely, without the slightest burden of proof of any kind of wrongdoing, look like an Article 10 court case waiting to happen. The Tories intend to scrap this right to free expression so that such a case can never be brought.

Theresa May's draconian new censorship proposals clearly conflict with Article 10, but they also seem to conflict with article 8 (a government administered pre-moderation regime on Internet activity would mean employees picking through your Internet activity to deem what is and isn't admissible), and article 11 (because banning people from speaking in public places without any evidence of wrongdoing curtails their right to free association).

A selection of quotations

"Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government; when this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved, and tyranny is erected on its ruins." Benjamin Franklin, 1737

"Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." Benjamin Franklin, 1755

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" Evelyn Beatrice Hall, 1906

"Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen." George Orwell, 1948

"Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear." Harry S. Truman, 1950

Widespread condemnation

The condemnation of Theresa May's proposal to introduce Orwellian new powers to curtail free speech and the right to assembly has come from every side of the political spectrum.

The political left has been unanimous in condemnation. I think I'm qualified to speak on behalf of left-wing people in order to say that totalitarian attacks on our freedoms such as these need to be condemned no matter who is imposing them. Once agents of the state believe that they have the right to silence people without evidence that they even intend to commit a crime, the public are in extreme danger.

Perhaps more surprising was the reaction from the extreme-right, who never tire of using the Islamist bogeyman for their own purposes. Perhaps it is because they are so used to using the Islamist bogeyman to hide their own political agendas that groups like UKIP and the unspeakably vile Britain First group have vociferously condemned Theresa May's plans too. 

Incredibly I actually agree with Britain First when they say that "If this new law goes through, it will effectively mean the end of democracy in this country" however I can't help marveling at the incredible brazenness of the Britain First spokesperson who said that "the establishment is very cleverly using the threat of Islamic extremism to introduce laws that curtail the freedom of expression for everyone", as if Britain First would never ever dream of hiding their own political agenda behind the threat of Islamist extremism.

As far as I'm concerned, even extremist groups like Britain First should be allowed to say what they want within the confines of the law. I strongly object to their views, and have tried to hold them to account for their spreading of ignorance and hatred and their shockingly dishonest fundraising tactics, but if silencing them comes at a cost of attacks on the rights to free speech and free assembly of the rest of us, then there is no doubt that they should be allowed to continue spitting their bile, as long as they do it within the confines of the law.

Perhaps the most eloquent critique of these new proposals came from David Davis (perhaps the closest you'll ever get to a decent principled Tory politician). Here's what he said:

"These are quite incredible powers to limit democratic rights, rights that people have had for 200 years in this country, and they are based on the Home Secretary having 'a reasonable belief' - that's the test, not an evidential test, 'a reasonable belief' - that an organisation will break certain criteria ... 

One of the criteria is a risk of harassment, alarm or distress. Well, one's tempted to say I do that to the Tory Party every day. This is really, really serious stuff ... 

We've got to be very careful that we don't end up like the people we're trying to defeat, forgetting what we're defending. We're defending a liberal democracy, one in which you can say all sorts of things."

The cheering idiots 

Every totalitarian regime in history has had a crowd of celebrating idiots behind them, and there were plenty of brown-nosed Tory party stooges on the payroll of the right-wing media prepared to sing Theresa May's praises for "bravely" attacking our long established rights, in order to "earn" their salaries.

Perhaps the most imbecilic Tory gloater of all was the dreadful Allison Pearson in the Daily Telegraph, who childishly redrew this authoritarian drive to over-write our centuries-long established rights as some kind of personal grudge match of "brave" and "tenacious" Theresa May versus "rude" and "very rude" Anjem Choudray.

In her excruciating article Person even took the time to inform us that May was "sharply dressed in black and white" as she announced her plan to curtail the rights of all of us because of the vile (but not actually unlawful) comments of a tiny, tiny minority. 
Perhaps the most idiotic part of Pearson's woeful article was the paragraph in which she blatantly generalises about Muslim immigrants, describing them as living in "ghettos", and indoctrinating their children and grandchildren in "an ideology that hates the host country". In not making it absolutely clear that she's referring to Islamist extremists, rather than the entire Muslim immigrant community, she's quite clearly falling foul of the inciting religious hatred element of the proposed new measures that she admits made her cheer out load when she heard Theresa May announce them!

The most sickening thing isn't that there are plenty of individuals revolting enough to have made a profession out of writing such crap (people will do all kinds of sick things for money), it's that there are so many cognitively lazy idiots out there who agree with her because they're so stupid that they're completely incapable of seeing past the Islamist bogeyman distraction plonked in from of them, or thinking about the wider picture, even just for the moment or two it would take to see Theresa May's plans as the totalitarian extremism that it so clearly is.

I'm not an extremist, am I?

I'm a political agitator and I'm proud of it. I'm proud that I've helped so many people re-engage with politics, that I've informed people of things the mainstream media has neglected to report properly, inspired people to become more politically active, and encouraged people to speak out against injustice.

If these new measures are passed into law it would be all to easy for the state to declare that they have reasonable belief that I may one day call for revolution, then subject everything I post on the Internet to pre-moderation and ban me from speaking in public or appearing on television.

I have worked hard to ensure that everything I write is lawful, yet these proposals would give the state the power to subject me to censorship without a shred of evidence that I have ever broken the law.

Do you believe that it is worth sacrificing my right to express political dissent in a perfectly lawful manner, on the pretext of silencing "nasty people" like Anjem Choudary or Paul Golding of Britain First? I certainly don't.

Who are the real extremists?

In my view the answer is obvious. The real extremists are not Islamist bogeymen who say vile things but avoid actually breaking any of the laws of the land. Neither are they the far-right hate groups like Britain First who have equally vile views of their own.

Neither of these groups are remotely capable of enforcing their warped ideas on wider society. Politicians like Theresa May on the other hand have the power to trash our long established rights to free speech and free association on the pretext of protecting us from so-called extremists, despite their failure to provide evidence of any criminality whatever.

The real extremists are not the nasty people who say that they would abolish our rights and confiscate our political freedoms should they ever obtain political power. The real extremists are the ones who actually wield political power and intend to actually abolish the rights and confiscate the political freedoms of all of us, on the pretext of protecting us from people who say nasty (but not criminally sanctionable) things.

Theresa May and the crowd of idiots who cheered her speech are the real extremists, and anyone who is not half-witted enough to be totally mesmerised by the spectre of Islamist bogeymen, should be very deeply concerned indeed about what Theresa May and her cheerleaders are trying to do.

 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 51 honourable MPs who opposed DRIP
           
The incompatibility of Christian ethics and modern Conservatism
                     
Owen Paterson's Cyber-swarm
       
A letter to fans of Workfare
                             
Secret Courts and the very Illiberal Democrats
                                         
12 Tory-UKIP defectors
                          
How NSA over-reach is worse than terrorism
                
12 Things you should know about Britain First
                      

The Tory ideological mission
                                
Margaret Thatcher's toxic neoliberal legacies