Jack Straw helped create the illiberal secret court rules he's now using himself

In 2013 Tories and their Liberal Democrat enablers colluded to launch an an astounding attack on the concept of fair and open justice by creating a system of secret courts to protect the political establishment from scrutiny.

Secret courts (or Closed Material Proceedings as they are officially known) create the bizarre Kafkaesque circumstances that people can have their fates decided in courtrooms that they are not allowed to enter, based on evidence they are not allowed to see.

Not only does Theresa May's secret court legislation prevent citizens from seeing the evidence that is being used to determine their fate, it prevents their lawyers from seeing it too.

In March 2013 it was clear that the Tories and Lib-Dems had enough votes to pass Theresa May's attack on the justice system, but the Green MP Caroline Lucas tried to make two key amendments to the legislation in order to try to at least prevent outright abuse of the system.

One amendment was to prevent the use of secret court proceedings in civil cases, and the other was to ensure that judges have a legal obligation to consider the "public interest in the fair and open administration of justice" before any secret court proceeding could be launched.

Both of these amendments were voted down by the Tories, their Lib-Dem sidekicks and four liberty-hating Labour MPs.

One of the four Labour MPs who voted with Theresa May and the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition to defeat these amendments was the former Labour Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.

Fast-forward to 2017 and Jack Straw is facing a civil lawsuit alleging his complicity in the abduction and torture of a Libyan dissident and his pregnant wife in 2004.

After the fall of the Gadaffi government in 2011 incriminating documents were found that showed how members of the British security services tipped off the Americans about the whereabouts of the anti-Gadaffi Libyan dissident Abdelhakim Belhadj and his pregnant wife.The couple were then were then kidnapped by US forces, transported out of Malaysia on a torture flight to Tripoli and then handed over to the Libyan government, where they were then tortured and subjected to interrogation with numerous questions supplied to them by MI6.

Not only is there strong evidence that the UK colluded with Gadaffi's secret police torture centres under Jack Straw's watch, he also deliberately and brazenly lied in the House of Commons 2005 when he claimed that Britain had never been involved in any US torture flight operations.

Now Jack Straw and the MI6 agent Mark Allen are being sued for damages by the torture victims for their role in this kidnap-torture plot, and the judge Andrew Popplewell (a privately educated establishment insider) has decided to invoke secret court rules to allow the defendants to present secret evidence that cannot be seen by the victims, their lawyers, members of the press, or the public.

Had Caroline Lucas' amendments to Theresa May's monstrous attack on the justice system been passed (with the help of Jack Straw's parliamentary votes) then Jack Straw wouldn't now be able to obstruct the fair and open administration of justice by using secret court proceedings, presumably to hide evidence of his complicity in the plot from public scrutiny.

After the decision to allow secret court proceedings in the case was announced, Belhadj said that "I went through a secret trial once before, in Gaddafi’s Libya. It took about a half hour, and I never saw any of the evidence against me. Later a guard came to my cell and tossed in a red jumpsuit – that was how I found out that the secret court had sentenced me to die ... Fatima and I have stuck with this case for all these years because we believe the British system, unlike Gaddafi’s, can deliver justice. But what kind of a trial will it be if we put in a mountain of evidence and government officials can simply refuse to answer us?"

It's impossible to deny that Belhadj has a point here, especially in light of the fact that one of the actual defendants in the case actually voted this shockingly illiberal system of judicial secrecy into existence in the first place.

You really couldn't get a clearer example of a self-interested politician making up laws for their own personal benefit than this, but that's how the British establishment operate, with the likes of Theresa May and Jack Straw colluding to scratch each others' backs.

And that's why Jeremy Corbyn is seen as such a huge threat by the Westminster establishment, because he's never shown any inclination to participate in this cross-party collusion to protect establishment elitists from the consequences of their own actions.

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OR

Vince Cable is the living embodiment of everything that's wrong with the Lib-Dems

It looks a lot like the Liberal Democrats are lining Vince Cable up to run as an unopposed candidate to lead their party. 

The problem of course is that Vince is a shockingly discredited figure whose appointment as leader would be yet another demonstration of the fact that the Lib-Dems are still living in denial about the damage they did by enabling the Tories back into power in 2010, rather than using the strong 3rd party position they had to actually hold them to account.

The economy

I used to quite like Vince Cable because he was one of the few politicians who seemed to have any real understanding of the global financial sector insolvency crisis at the time, but he pissed that reputation away completely when he conducted one of the most obviously self-serving U-turns in political history.

Before the 2010 General Election Vince repeatedly warned against deep ideologically driven cuts to public spending. He said "it would be reckless to plunge the economy back into recession through the immediate large-scale slashing of public services and jobs" and against making "damaging cuts in investment that undermine the country’s long-term future" [source].

Seven years of economic stagnation and failed economic targets from the Tories as a result of their ideological fixation with austerity dogma says that Vince was absolutely right to warn against reckless large-scale slashing of government expenditure and deliberate under-investment in the nation's future.

The problem of course is that Vince abandoned his anti-austerity position faster than you could say "opportunism" when the 2010 General Election resulted in a hung parliament, and went off to spend five years at the Treasury actually helping George Osborne to implement his socially and economically ruinous austerity agenda.

It's one thing being an ideologically driven nitwit like George Osborne who actually seemed to believe that "let's cut our way to growth" was a coherent and viable economic strategy, but Vince was one of the leading voices against this kind of economically illiterate delusion.

Vince abandoned economic sense entirely and lent a veneer of respectability to austerity dogma by actually serving George Osborne at the Treasury, which makes him an awful lot worse than Osborne, because Vince knew perfectly well how much damage he was actively helping Osborne to inflict, but he did it anyway.

Tuition fees

Vince Cable was one of the leading Lib-Dems who decided that completely shafting the students who helped vote them into power was a price worth paying for the self-satisfaction of a few years of ministerial salaries and the taste of some second hand Tory power.

The result of the Lib-Dem betrayal of their core student demographic is that students from the poorest backgrounds are now leaving university with £57,000 worth of debt, and an astonishing 75% of graduates are projected to never pay back their vast debts because of the extortionate 6% interest rates.

Despite these shocking statistics Vince Cable is insistent that the Lib-Dems imposing these vindictive disposable income-wrecking taxes on aspiration, despite their 2010 election pledge to actually scrap tuition fees, was the right thing to do.

Shafting one of your core demographics is an astoundingly inept move, and the Lib-Dems will never recover for as long as they continue the farce that imposing the highest public university fees in the world on English students was somehow a justifiable move.

It's much more than the fact that students won't come back to the Lib-Dems, it's the fact that anyone with any political sense at all will think to themselves "if the Lib-Dems were prepared to totally shaft their own student demographic for their own self-serving reasons, why wouldn't they shaft me too?"

Liberalism

Another Lib-Dem principle to get slung into the political dustbin during the coalition years was the party's commitment to liberalism. Between 2010 and 2015 the Lib-Dems helped the Tories to impose some of the most right-wing authoritarian and downright illiberal legislation since universal suffrage.

One of the worst examples of Lib-Dem backed illiberalism was Theresa May's depraved move to scrap the principle of open justice with Secret Courts (Closed Material Proceedings) in her 2013 Justice and Security Act.

This legislation creates the situation where a defendant can have their fate decided in a courtroom they are not allowed to enter, on charges they are not allowed to know, based on evidence that they are not allowed to see, and instead of having their own lawyer, they're given what is called a "special advocate" who is appointed to "defend" them by the state that is prosecuting them!

Vince Cable was an enthusiastic backer of this outrageously illiberal assault on the openness and accountability of the justice system, so anyone who supports the Lib-Dems because they consider themselves liberal should understand that Vince is so illiberal that he actively supported most of Theresa May's most illiberal and downright malicious schemes.

Warmongering

Before his conversion to Toryism Vince Cable was a man who described the invasion and occupation of Iraq as "the last straw" and complained about the nebulous ever changing justification for the occupation of Afghanistan.

After his conversion to Toryism Vince became a man who voted in favour of creating a terrorist breeding ground in Libya, and then even backed David Cameron's lunatic plan to hand Damascus to ISIS by attacking Assad (which was thankfully defeated when 30 Tory MPs and 10 Lib Dems had the good sense to rebel against Cameron's rush to war making him the first Prime Minister to lose a war vote since 1782).

Charles Kennedy won a great number of people to the Lib-Dem cause with his principled stance against imperialist warmongering, but Vince Cable helped to demolish that legacy by backing every imperialist adventure Cameron proposed, no matter how ridiculously ill-conceived.

Strategic ineptitude

Back in May 2010 one thing was absolutely clear to most of us; David Cameron and the Tories needed Nick Clegg and the Lib-Dems a hell of a lot more than the Lib-Dems needed the Tories, but Clegg, Cable, Alexander and co were so giddy with excitement at the chance to become government ministers that they agreed to an absurdly one-sided coalition arrangement that saw them shaft their own core demographics, abandon their own principles, and cement the Tories into power for 5 ruinous years.

A look at Theresa May's deal with the DUP bigots shows what kind of agreement the Lib-Dems should have aimed at. 

The DUP knew that Theresa May needed their 10 votes more than they needed her, so they blagged everything they could, including a £1 billion bung for Northern Ireland, promises that the Tories would bin bits of their own manifesto, and on the DUP side they reserved the right to rebel against any particular bits of Tory malice they don't like, and limited the agreement to two years!

The Lib-Dems had 57 votes to bargain with, but they were the ones who made most of the concessions in their desperation to bag ministerial salaries for themselves! 

The Lib-Dems were so strategically inept they willingly allowed the Tories to bind their hands and feet and then spend five years whipping them to within an inch of their lives, and Vince was a major player in negotiating this absolute capitulation of a deal.

Why would anyone with the remotest bit of political nous vote ever for a party led by such a strategically inept charlatan?

Vince Cable is dead wood

Vince Cable is the living embodiment of Lib-Dem betrayal. He stands for nothing except for self-serving political opportunism, and that's why he would make such a fantastic choice of leader for the Lib-Dems.

If they wanted to rebuild their shattered reputation then they would need to move on from the shockingly unprincipled old guard and find a leader with a coherent vision of what the purpose of the Liberal Democrats actually is, and the conviction to stick by this vision when opposition parties offer them trinkets and baubles to lob all of their convictions in the political bin.

Vince was a major player in the Lib-Dem leadership who saw their share of the vote plunge from 23% (on the verge of turning the UK into a genuine three party state) to below 8% (back to the kind of hopeless mess they were in under Jeremy Thorpe back in the 1970s). 

You'd have to be as delusional as ... well ... as delusional as a Liberal Democrat to imagine that the voters will come flocking back to the Lib-Dems if one of the main architects of their collapse is handed the leadership in an uncontested election. 

But good on them for finding their ideal leader. Who better to lead an unpopular party of self-serving political opportunists than one of the most discredited and unprincipled charlatans in British politics?

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OR

David Cameron "did a funny" so all is forgiven

David Cameron has been using his lucrative US public speaking tour to brazenly reinvent history but the mainstream media (including supposedly left-wing outlets like the Guardian) were too busy cooing over his Trump joke to bother holding him to account over his absurd revisionism.

Cameron made a lame jape about the best thing about having resigned in disgrace after losing his EU referendum gamble was that he no longer has to listen to wiretapped Donald Trump conversations and the mainstream press adored it. They lavished Cameron with praise for his wit, as if he'd thought of the joke himself rather than had it written for him by one of his script writers.

The press were so busy lauding Cameron for his edgy topical joke and helping him rehabilitate his ruined reputation that they totally failed in their duty to hold him to account over the revisionist drivel he was spouting.

Cameron claimed in his speech that the US and the UK have been "the guardians of freedom, of tolerance, of equality and, yes, of justice".

Freedom

As Prime Minister David Cameron was a big supporter of stripping law abiding citizens and civic organisations of their freedoms.

Cameron's government introduced the Gagging Law to stop charities, voluntary groups, community organisations and trade unions from criticising the Tory government.

One of the freedoms David Cameron and his savagely authoritarian Home Secretary Theresa May despised the most was the right to privacy. Cameron's government introduced Internet filters and legalised the unlawful snooping that the secret services had been doing for decades. Shortly after he quit the Internet Snoopers' Charter was passed, meaning that the concept of freedom from state snooping has been essentially abolished and the UK state gained unprecedented snooping powers that would have turned the East German Stasi green with envy.

Here's a genuine David Cameron quote to give you a clear idea of what his true feelings about freedom were.

"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." [source]

What he was clearly expressing there was a desire to scrap the freedom of ordinary law-abiding citizens to go about their lives without being snooped on and persecuted by the state.

Tolerance

David Cameron's track record on tolerance is a mixed bag. To his credit he fought down the right-wing of his own party and collaborated with Labour, the Lib-Dems and various other opposition parties to deliver gay equality. But on the other hand Cameron and his government were never averse to using extreme divisive rhetoric in order to appeal to the extreme-right demographic. 

Take Theresa May's trolling of high migration neighbourhoods with her appalling "Go Home" vans. Take Theresa May's regular use of divisive anti-migrant rhetoric to appeal to the Ukipper demographic. Take Theresa May's spouse visa rules that openly discriminate against women, and against people who live in the less affluent regions of the UK. Take Iain Duncan Smith's sickening dehumanisation campaign against sick and disabled people. Take George Osborne's austerity agenda that loaded the burden of cuts mainly onto the shoulders of women.

Cameron always talked a good game on tolerance, but the divisive language and discriminatory practices of his government clearly proved that Cameron's Tory party had a very different agenda to the inclusive tolerant agenda Cameron so often liked to talk about.

Equality

The United Kingdom is an astoundingly unequal country. Parts of the UK are the richest places in the world, but of the 10 poorest regions in northern Europe, 9 are in the UK. 

David Cameron's government made this situation very much worse by handing one tax break after another to the super-rich minority, whilst loading the burden of George Osborne's ideological austerity agenda onto everyone else. The result of which is that the super-rich minority ended up literally doubling their wealth, while ordinary working people suffered the worst collapse in the value of their wages since records began.

Cameron's government were so successful in rigging the economy in favour of the super-rich minority that the UK was the only country in the developed world to see wages falling in value while the economy was actually growing. 

If the economy was growing, but the share of the wealth going to working people was in decline, where did all of the extra money go? To the tiny super-rich minority who bankrolled Cameron's Tory party of course.

Justice

If David Cameron's pretensions about being a champion of freedom and equality were laughable, then his claim to have been some kind of guardian of justice as Prime Minister was frankly absurd.

Who could forget that it was David Cameron's government that stripped legal aid to the bone in order to ensure that ever fewer ordinary people have access to adequate legal representation?

Who could forget that David Cameron's government was ruled to be unlawfully discriminating against people with mental health disabilities by forcing them through their discriminatory Work Capacity Assessment regime, and that Cameron's government ignored the ruling and carried on regardless?

Who could forget that David Cameron's government set about privatising vast swathes of the justice system creating loads of glaringly obvious financial conflicts of interest?

Who could forget that David Cameron's government trashed the concept of open justice by introducing Secret Courts where a person can have their fate decided in a courtroom they are not allowed to enter, under charges they are not allowed to know based on evidence they are not allowed to see?

Who could forget that when David Cameron's government were judged to have broken the law by unlawfully forcing thousands of unemployed people onto unpaid "workfare" placements, they stuck two fingers up at the justice system by rewriting the rules and retroactively applied them so that their unlawful rules would have been lawful had they been written that way at the time?

Who could forget that this retroactive rewriting of the law scam was subsequently ruled unlawful in the courts?

Conclusion

David Cameron gambled the entire future of the UK in order to gain a little bit of short-term party political advantage and he lost.

Instead of remaining in politics to try to fix the situation he himself created, he ran off at the first opportunity to embark on a lucrative public speaking tour of the United States in which he spouts absolute drivel about how he was some kind of guardian of the things his government relentlessly attacked.

Instead of holding him to account for this disgraceful behaviour the mainstream media overlook it all because he "did a funny" about Donald Trump.

The media are supposed to hold the powerful to account and expose their lies, not help them to polish up their tarnished reputations and laugh obsequiously at their jokes.

 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

Why do people actually trust Theresa May to deliver Brexit?

Theresa May's two main political characteristics are her savage authoritarian streak and her abject incompetence, but somehow significant swathes of the public somehow trust her to deliver a good Brexit deal for Britain!

Incompetence

Given that fears over immigration played such a pivotal role in the EU referendum debate, the lack of scrutiny of Theresa May's woeful track record on immigration has been extremely noticeable, especially the silence of Brexiters and the anti-immigration right-wing propaganda rags.

In 2010 Theresa May arrived at the Home Office promising to cut net migration to below 100,000 but by 2016 she had overseen one all-time record high spike in immigration after another, yet somehow an awful lot of Brexiters have this bizarre misguided confidence that Theresa May is some kind of "safe pair of hands" who will steer us through the Brexit negotiations.

One of my favourite demonstrations of Theresa May's abject ineptitude was the time she gave a huge parliamentary shout out to a vile misogynistic, xenophobic extreme-right Twitter troll during Prime Minister's Questions. We all know how the press would have reacted had it been Jeremy Corbyn reading out a Tweet from a disgustingly abusive Twitter troll in order to score cheap political points, but as darling of the mainstream media Theresa May was allowed to totally get away with it.

Another example of Theresa May's incompetence is the shockingly inept "negotiation strategy" she took over six months to come up with. Not only is "give a load of favours to our corporate mates or we'll launch a mutually destructive nuclear Brexit" a woefully inept diplomatic gambit, it's also a completely ludicrous stance to take if you're not even drawing up a contingency plan in case you're actually made to play your bluff.

Yet another example of Theresa May's incompetence is the fact that she allowed Philip Hammond to include his manifesto pledge wrecking National Insurance hike in the spring budget, and didn't even brief her cabinet about what they were going to do. Attacking ordinary working people with tax hikes whilst giving handouts to their corporate mates was bad enough, but not even telling her inner circle what they were planning so that they could coordinate their excuse-making was so brazenly inept that even the right-wing press (Telegraph, Times, S*n, Spectator) picked up on it.

Authoritarianism

Theresa May's track record at the Home Office provides plenty of proof of her right-wing authoritarian streak. She's clearly the kind of person who thinks that the public exist to serve the will of politicians like her, rather than vice versa.

Theresa May introduced secret courts, discriminatory economic apartheid measures against British families, and Dripa, she oversaw the development of the extremist Snoopers' Charter, and she blabbered on endlessly about scrapping our human rights and introducing legislation to curtail the free speech of law-abiding citizens.

Since she became Prime Minister her authoritarian streak has got even worse. Who could forget her bragging about her willingness to commit mass indiscriminate genocide? Who could forget the passage of the Snoopers' Charter into actual law, meaning that our private communications data can be snooped on and trawled through by dozens of non-terrorism related state agencies like the Food Standards Agency, The Gambling Commission and the Health and Safety Executive?

Perhaps the most glaring example of Theresa May's authoritarian extremism was her effort to scrap the principle of parliamentary sovereignty in order to establish the precedent that she can make up and repeal laws at her own will, free from parliamentary scrutiny or approval. The fact that her attempt to turn Britain into her own personal autocracy was beaten in the High Court, and then beaten again at the Supreme Court is another demonstration of the incompetence I detailed above.

A lot of people used "freedom" as their justification for voting Brexit. Freedom from the unelected EU technocrats, freedom from EU laws ... that kind of thing. What I suspect they didn't vote for was the "freedom" to be treated as a worthless peasant who is undeserving of basic human rights by a power hungry hard-right autocrat.

Where does confidence in Theresa May's abilities stem from?

It's pretty well understood that once propaganda narratives have been set it's incredibly difficult to undo them, no matter how downright misleading they actually are. The reason being that it's a lot easier to fool a person than convince them they've been fooled.

The reason Theresa May was subjected to so little scrutiny as she was being appointed as leader of the Tory party, and consequently Prime Minister of the UK is absolutely obvious.

Instead of allowing the media to focus on the extraordinary failure of David Cameron's self-serving EU referendum gamble, his cowardly resignation, and the blatantly undemocratic coronation of his inept and savagely authoritarian successor, the Anyone But Corbyn mob decided to make their inept coup plot the main focus of the mainstream media headlines for the entire summer.

If Labour had spoken with a united voice in condemnation of the Tory Brexit shambles, the blatantly undemocratic Tory leadership election farce, and Theresa May's shocking track record at the Home Office, they could at least have established some public doubts about Theresa May's leadership and the ridiculous "safe pair of hands" trope being pushed by right-wing media hacks but instead they focused their efforts, and the mainstream media's attention on their ridiculous pre-planned coup against their own party leader!

Of course the hard-right dominated press were always going to be biased in favour of Theresa May, but by launching a cynical pre-planned revolt against their own leader at the least opportune time imaginable, the Labour Party right-wingers gave Theresa May the easiest ride possible, and allowed the mainstream media to go virtually unchallenged as they set the extraordinarily misleading propaganda narrative that this incompetent and dangerously authoritarian woman is some kind of "safe pair of hands".

In my view nobody is more responsible for the lack of scrutiny that Theresa May has benefited from than the coup-plotter Labour MPs.

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

OR

The terrifying right-wing contempt for justice and the rule of law

The underlying contempt for justice amongst many on the political right has been clear for some time. It's come to the fore in recent times with the British right-wing propaganda rags attacking judges as "enemies of the people" and now Donald Trump Twitter abusing a well respected judge for daring to over-rule his Muslim ban as unconstitutional, but for those of us who have been paying attention, it's been an obvious problem for a long time.

You only have to look back at Theresa May's appalling track record at the Home Office to see manifestations of this opposition to the concept of open justice.

One of the big alarm bells was the introduction of Secret Courts through "Justice and Security" legislation in 2013. This legislation fundamentally undermines the concept that justice needs to be seen to be done in order to be effective. If people can be locked up by a court they can't enter on charges they don't know relating to evidence they're not allowed to see, then how can anyone know that the justice system is being administered fairly?

Theresa May's reaction to the Edward Snowden revelations was telling. Instead of seeking justice against the people who had been unlawfully stealing the private communication data of millions of British people and businesses, she introduced rushed legislation to temporarily legalise what they had been doing unlawfully for years (Dripa) and then permanently legalised mass data retention and snooping by all manner of non-terrorism related state agencies through the Snoopers' Charter, an act that also retroactively legalised the criminal behaviour of the surveillance state and allows the state to lie in court in order to secure convictions!.

Theresa May's next huge display of contempt for the rule of law came when she attempted to bypass parliament entirely out of a desire to conduct the Brexit process as an autocrat who gets to make and repeal laws at their personal will, free from legislative or judicial oversight.

As this astounding power grab was defeated in the courts the right-wing press went into an unprecedented frenzy of condemnation. The tabloid hatchet jobs on the judges who ruled in favour of parliamentary sovereignty (against autocracy) were absolutely shocking. It's hard to imagine how anyone could be uneducated enough not to be horrified at the Daily Mail describing judges as "enemies of the people", but millions of people actually applauded these displays of contempt for the rule of law under the delusion that High Court judges are the evil metropolitan elite, and Theresa May is some kind of not-at-all dictatorial woman of the people!

Revealing their true character Theresa May and the Tories refused to condemn the appalling tabloid hatchet jobs on the judges. As far as they were concerned a wave of public contempt towards the justice system was exactly what they needed in order to disempower parliament and the courts and centralise even more political power in the hands of the Theresa May and the Tory party.

Credit: Sousa & Machedo Arts

The refusal of the Tory government to condemn the abuse of judges was deeply shocking, but the sight of an actual President of the United States actively delegitimising and threatening judges is pretty near top-level craziness.

Trump signed an astonishing 22 Executive Orders in his first couple of weeks as President. It soon became clear that he didn't even bother to read some of them. He apparently had little idea that Steve Bannon had promoted himself onto the National Security Council in one of the Orders he signed without bothering to understand. 

It's no wonder that this blizzard of hastily drafted Executive Orders is falling foul of the United States constitution. Trump's Muslim Ban was so profoundly unconstitutional it's astonishing that it was ever enacted. Not as astonishing though as Trump's petulant and abusive reaction to being denied his own way by the justice system.

You don't have to be an expert in the history of the American justice system to understand that a sitting President publicly lambasting a judge for the "crime" of upholding the constitution of the United States is utterly extraordinary stuff.

Neither do you have to be an expert in the authoritarian dictatorships of the 20th Century to see that contempt for the rule of law goes hand-in-hand with despotism. There's little excuse for not at least having heard of the political show trials in Nazi Germany, the Great Purge in Soviet Russia or the campaigns of extrajudicial killings carried out by US backed Latin American dictators.

My mention of Soviet Russia makes it clear that justice-hating despots can come from the left or the right, but modern manifestations of this contempt for justice are clearly coming from the political right:Theresa May's repeated assaults on the justice system; the Britain First leader openly calling for instant lynch mob killings on the streets;  the baying attacks on judges from extreme-right propaganda rags like the Daily Mail and the Express,  the Michigan Republican leader Dan Adamini calling for a repeat of the 1970 Kent State shooting of unarmed protesters; Donald Trump Twitter-ranting about the judge who dared to defy his Muslim Ban by upholding the US constitution.

It's pretty clear where this contempt for justice stems from. Wielders of political and economic power like to see justice system as something that exists primarily to defend their interests. They certainly don't see it as something that exists in order protect the interests of ordinary people from them.

The establishment elitists see justice as a commodity that can be bought and sold, not something that exists to serve everyone. Thus the extraordinary tantrums when the justice system intervenes to prevent them carrying out some of their appalling schemes.

The rage of the Express and the Daily Mail against the judges who ruled to protect the concept of parliamentary sovereignty, and the rage of Donald Trump against the judge who upheld the United States constitution both come from the same essential source. The hard-right craving for despotism and the establishment of a permanent dictatorship of those with the most capital.

 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

Why do so many people adore Theresa May?

One of the most astounding things about the rise of Theresa May is the way that millions of people have just uncritically rote learned the right-wing media trope that she is some kind of "safe pair of hands" and then set about mindlessly repeating it as if it's their own opinion, rather than something bizarrely counter-factual that they've been programmed to say.

Even the remotest familiarity with Theresa May's track record at the Home Office makes this "safe pair of hands" story look absolutely ridiculous. This is a woman who promised to cut net migration to below 100,000 but actually oversaw the biggest inward migration peaks in all of British history!

Not only does May have a track record of brazen incompetence, she's also a hard-right authoritarian with a penchant for totalitarian policies like secret courts, discriminatory immigration rules for British spouses, hopelessly flawed, evidence-free and unworkable drugs laws, unprecedented state snooping powers and the abolition of our human rights.

Even if we ignore her track record of appalling incompetence and savage authoritarianism, it should be easy to see what a horrifying person she is: 

• In her inaugural speech as Prime Minister she cried crocodile tears about how white working class kids are so unlikely to make it to university, then immediately set about scrapping all of the grants and bursaries that allowed kids from low-income families to get a university education. 

• She bragged in parliament about her willingness to incinerate 100,000 innocent men, women and children in a nuclear fireball. 

• She gave a disgustingly obnoxious right-wing Twitter troll a massive and unprecedented "shout out" by quoting him at Prime Minister's Questions and writing him into the permanent Hansard record as a consequence. 

• She blatantly evades answering the questions she's asked and continually talks in mind-numbingly stupid platitudes like "Brexit means Brexit" and "living within our means" as if the public are just a gigantic collection of total halfwits who can be easily fobbed off with ridiculous economic fairy stories and tautological gibberish.

• She decided to completely screw over the UK taxpayer by continuing on with Cameron and Osborne's shambolic scheme to bribe the French and Chinese into building our nuclear power infrastructure for us by guaranteeing them double the market price for electricity for 35 years and then promising to load the astronomical nuclear waste storage costs onto the UK taxpayer too!

• She introduced the most extreme state surveillance laws in any developed nation that will allow the employees of all manner of non-terrorism related state agencies (the Food Standards Agency, the Gambling Commission, the Health and Safety Executive ...)  to snoop on the private communications data of innocent people. Additionally the Snoopers' Charter will also allow the police and secret services to lie in court in order to secure convictions!

• She is determined to scrap the concept of parliamentary sovereignty so that she can make up the law as she goes along to suit herself and the rogues gallery of bankers, hedge fund managers, tax-dodgers, landed gentry, property speculators and private health corporations who bankroll the Tory party.

Given the mountain of evidence that Theresa May is a nasty, dishonest and blatantly incompetent politician with alarming hard-right authoritarian tendencies, it's astonishing that so many people have rote learned the absurdly inaccurate "safe pair of hands" trope from the mainstream media that she's actually become Britain's favourite politician!

It's obvious that the Mainstream media have helped to create this misleadingly positive impression by completely failing to hold her to account for her blunders (imagine the absolute furore if Jeremy Corbyn had quoted a vile misogynistic Twitter troll in parliament) or her dictatorial Snoopers' Charter that would have made the East German Statsi turn green with envy.

It's astonishing that people allow themselves to be hoodwinked like this but it's undeniable that they have been. So what is it that people like about Theresa May?

Perhaps there's just something in the British psyche that makes an awful lot of people adore Theresa May's overly strict nanny persona? Perhaps millions of people share the same shameful and deeply buried perversion that wants some kind of dominatrix nanny figure to punish and abuse them with impunity? What other explanation is there?

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