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.

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The corporate outsourcing parasites that are already cashing in on Brexit

A bunch of parasitical outsourcing corporations are already becoming major beneficiaries of this Tory administered Brexit shambles because they are having their rip-off contracts extended because civil servants are too busy dealing with Brexit to conduct competitive tenders for the work, so they're just allowing the contracts to roll over indefinitely.

The National Audit Office have found that 54% of the government outsourcing contracts up for renewal in 2016-17 have been automatically extended rather than put out to tender.

The problem isn't just that civil servants are being diverted into sorting out the Tories' Brexit shambles, government departments had already had their staff cut to the bone by Tory austerity with a 26% decline in the number of civil servants since the global financial sector insolvency crisis of 2007-08. So now we have the scenario that already overstretched government departments are having their staff poached to deal with Brexit, meaning these departments don't have the slightest chance of ensuring that taxpayers get anything like value for money on the £billions in corporate outsourcing contracts they're lumbered with.

The National Audit Office also revealed that an astounding 31% of government spending now goes on procurement from external providers. This means that the government are now spending an astounding £242 billion on outsourced goods and services (which is more than double the cost of running the entire NHS), but now the Tory government are not bothering to even pretend to be getting value for taxpayers' money by conducting competitive tenders for this work. They're just letting companies keep their lucrative contracts no matter whether anyone else could do the work cheaper.

The beneficiaries of these contract extensions include Serco and G4S who robbed £180 million between them on outsourced electronic tagging contracts by fraudulently claiming to have tagged prisoners who were dead, still in prison, or entirely made up.

Another beneficiary will be Capita who has had its contract to run PIP disability assessments renewed for two years until 2019.

Tom Gash from the Institute of Government said that "it's a damning sign that the government is letting Brexit distract from the core job of ensuring taxpayers’ money is being well spent ... Extensions should be the exception not the rule, as they represent a missed opportunity for finding better ways of designing services, reducing costs and increasing competition". [source]

It was always beyond obvious that a Brexit administered by the hard-right fringe of the Tory party was going to end up handsomely benefiting their corporate mates at the expense of the taxpayer, but few could have imagined that parasitical outsourcing corporations would end up cashing in quite so quickly from the Tory Brexit chaos.

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

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David Cameron's speaking gig with Bain Capital

Back in 2013 David Cameron's Tory party oversaw the sale of our NHS blood plasma supply unit to a vampire capitalist group called Bain Capital (which was founded by the 2012 Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney).

Fast-forward three years and Bain Capital have already handed David Cameron a lucrative speaking gig at one of their events just weeks after he quit politics after his Brexit gamble went so spectacularly wrong. Thanks to the extraordinarily lax rules covering financial rewards to former politicians it's not clear how much Cameron is going to be paid for his speaking gig, but given that that the former foreign secretary William Hague is expecting to make some £4 million per year on the speaking circuit at £50,000 - £100,000 per appearance, Cameron's speaking fees are unlikely to be less than six figures.

It's no wonder Cameron was so keen to abandon politics when there are such rich pickings to be had from the companies his government handed favours to during his time as Prime Minister.

Some other potential speaking gigs for David Cameron include:

Wonga: The revolving door between David Cameron's government and this appalling legal loan shark company has been well documented. Cameron's sack-at-will legislation (drawn up by the Wonga investor Adrian Beecroft) must have been a real boon to the company as desperate sacked workers turned to them for their rip-off 5,000%+ APR loans. Surely Beecroft and his boys at Wonga could return the favour by handing Cameron a few lucrative public speaking gigs?

Circle Health: This private operator of various NHS facilities across England was one of the major beneficiaries of Cameron's 2012 NHS privatisation by stealth bill. Circle (owned by numerous major Tory party donors) was responsible for the absolute debacle at Hinchingbrook hospital, yet they're still running other NHS facilities across the country. The least they could do for Cameron is stuff him a few hundred grand for all of the NHS services they've snapped up under his watch.

Landsdowne Partners: This hedge fund made a £36 million profit when Cameron's government sold off the Royal Mail at way below its true market value. Given their enormous profits surely they can shove a bit Cameron's way?

G4S and Serco: In 2013 these global outsourcing were caught defrauding the taxpayer out of £180 million by submitting false invoices for the electronic tagging of non-existent prisoners. Cameron's government promised to punish them by temporarily banning both companies from bidding for contracts, but secretly handed them £350 million worth of contracts when they were supposedly banned. Even worse than that, the Tories carried on paying these companies for electronic tagging services way into 2015, two years after they were caught defrauding the taxpayer. Surely these companies can find a few hundred grand apiece to stuff into Cameron's back pocket?

Caudrilla: The fortunes of Cuadrilla and other fracking companies received a massive boost when Cameron's government decided to halve the rate of corporation tax for fracking companies. The fracking boom and bust in the US is proof that fracking is only financially viable if energy prices remain high, so the champagne corks must have been popping at Cuadrilla headquarters when Cameron and Osborne signed the UK taxpayer up to an absolutely ludicrous deal with the French and Chinese states to pay them double the market rate for electricity from Hinkley Point C for an astonishing 35 year period. No doubt Cuadrilla and other fracking companies will feel a moral obligation to repay Cameron for the vast tax cut he handed them and his decision to ensure their financial viability by signing the UK taxpayer up to pay massively inflated energy prices for generations to come?

Virgin Group: Richard Branson's Virgin Group have been major beneficiaries of numerous Tory privatisation schemes. From heavily subsidised rail contracts to huge slices of NHS infrastructure Branson's business did extremely well at raking in taxpayers' cash during David Cameron's time in office. The least "beardie" could do is repay Cameron with a few six figure public speaking gigs?

Times have moved on since former Prime Ministers quietly stepped out of the limelight having achieved the pinnacle of public life. These days becoming Prime Minister or an important government minister is just a stepping stone in the process of becoming filthy rich.

After serving as Prime Minister John Major cashed in by hooking up with corporations like the Carlyle Group arms company, but Tony Blair really blazed the trail for David Cameron with his corporate consultancies with the likes of JP Morgan, his lucrative speaking gigs and his work as adviser to all kinds of brutal dictatorial regimes.

After shafting the British public with his failed Brexit gamble Cameron literally couldn't wait to get stuck into what was clearly always the endgame; making himself filthy rich gorging on corporate speaking fees and lucrative consultancy positions.

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

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The US is turning against the Prison Industrial Complex, but it's thriving in Britain

On Thursday 18th of August 2016 the US Department of Justice made a hugely significant announcement that they are planning to end the use of private prisons after a report found that private prisons are less safe and provide inferior correctional services than government run facilities.

The huge growth in the US prison population, the widespread use of private prisons in the US and the use of prisoners as cheap labour is a phenomenon commonly referred to as the Prison Industrial Complex. This describes the situation where private companies that profit from running prisons and exploiting prisoners as cheap labour lobby for ever harsher laws in order to boost the prisoner population and their own profit margins.

Civil rights campaigners and hip-hop artists have been complaining about the Prison Industrial Complex for years, noting how non-white people are far more likely to be imprisoned for non-violent offences like drug possession.

When it comes to private prisons the conflicts of interest are absolutely obvious. Government operated prison services have an interest in reducing prisoner numbers through correctional services like education, apprenticeships, anger management courses etc because a lower prison population means either lower taxes, or tax revenues that can be spent on other valuable services like education or infrastructure. Private prisons have an interest in keeping prisoner populations as high as possible in order to boost their profitability, meaning that any efforts to rehabilitate prisoners and reduce the chances of re-offending are utterly counter-productive.

The obvious scope for corruption was highlighted by the appalling 2008 "kids for cash" scandal where two Pennsylvania judges were caught taking bribes from the owner of a private youth detention company in return for sentencing kids for utterly trivial offences like mocking a teacher on MySpace and trespassing in a vacant building!

Another scandal broke in 2016 when an undercover reporter from Mother Jones wrote a damning expose on the private prison business. This was followed soon after by the damning inspector General's report into the private prison business.

The US Senator Bernie Sanders has campaigned against private prisons and the Prison Industrial Complex for decades. Here's his response to the announcement that private prisons are to be phased out.

"It is an international embarrassment that we put more people behind bars than any other country on earth. Due in large part to private prisons, incarceration has been a source of major profits to private corporations. Study after study after study has shown private prisons are not cheaper, they are not safer, and they do not provide better outcomes for either the prisoners or the state.   

We have got to end the private prison racket in America as quickly as possible. Our focus should be on keeping people out of jail and making sure they stay out when they are released.  This means funding jobs and education not more jails and incarceration."

The the announcement that the US Department of Justice is planning to let all of their private prison contracts expire over the next five years resulted in an immediate slump in the stock values of private prison companies like GEO.

Even though the evidence against the private prison industry has been compelling, the announcement of the phase-out of private prisons in the US is still surprising because of the predictable freefall in private prison stocks. It's clear that taking away their opportunity to get rich on the back of the US taxpayer, and by exploiting prisoners as free labour is going to make a lot of rich and powerful people very angry indeed.

It's also surprising because the obvious insanity of private for-profit prisons in the US has long been seen as one of the factors that makes the radically right-wing US version of capitalism so much worse than the more social democratic versions of capitalism.

The irony for British people is that we'll no longer be able to high-horse about American capitalism being so much more rabid than our own version because our governments have imitated the US system by introducing a load of private prisons and detention centres in the UK, and they've also been allowing private companies to undercut the legitimate employment market by taking advantage of the UK prison population as a cheap source of labour.

Instead of getting angry about their lost opportunity to profiteer out of the US justice system, these companies could consider shifting their attention to the ongoing Tory marketisation of the UK justice system.

The Tories are creating huge profiteering opportunities by carving up and privatising all elements of the UK justice system. They're not just intent on building more and more privately operated prisons and detention centres and allowing private companies to use prisoners as cheap labour, they've also been busy trying to privatise front line police services (Theresa May is a big advocate of police privatisation), court facilities and services, electronic tagging (subject to a massive £180 million tagging fraud by G4S and Serco), and probation services. They've also been trying to reform legal aid in order to drive smaller specialist practices out of business and hand a bigger market share to multinational behemoths like Serco, G4S and Capita.

The conflicts of interest are absolutely obvious when the privatised police unit that makes the arrest, the forensic science unit, the legal aid lawyer, the courtroom facilities and services, and the private prison are all operated by the same small cabal of corporations, then upon release the probation officer and the electronic tagging company are run by the same corporations too.

If a rare display of evidence based policy making drives the private prison profiteers out of the US justice system, they can be assured that the Tories will welcome them with open arms to help them with their project to turn the UK justice system into a conflict of interest riddled free-for-all for corporate profiteers.

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

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Trident renewal

£205 billion (a price tag that has doubled since 2015) is an extraordinary amount of money to spend on renewing a bunch of pointless doomsday machines that nobody in their right mind would ever use.

Nuclear weapons are a massively expensive hangover from the Cold War. They are literally useless in the kind of asymmetric warfare the the United Kingdom keeps getting involved in. Nuclear weapons are of no use against the likes of ISIS and Al Qaida, and neither are they of any use against homegrown terrorists. France's stockpile of nukes hasn't stopped them from suffering one terrorist atrocity after another and the same goes for Pakistan.

The idea that the UK would be open to invasion (from Russia? China? Who?) should we stop wasting vast fortunes on maintaining the capacity to commit mass indiscriminate slaughter is utterly absurd. Italy has no nukes, Spain has no nukes, Japan has no nukes, Australia has no nukes, Brazil has no nukes. If countries without the means to commit mass genocide are so ripe for invasion, why have none of them been invaded?

Another thing to consider is the fact that operation and maintenance of the UK's "independent" nuclear deterrent was privatised back in 1994. The consortium that operates our nuclear weapons is 66% owned by US corporations, and 33% owned by the corporate outsourcing giant Serco.

Serco are so incompetent that they couldn't even run the GP out of hours service in Cornwall properly, but somehow they're in charge of maintaining nuclear weapons!

If just half of the £205 billion (and rising) cost of renewing the UK's ability to commit mass indiscriminate slaughter was spent on improving the UK's conventional (useable) military capacity, the UK would be militarily stronger, it would create far more jobs, and there would be plenty of money left over to invest in infrastructure and services to actually benefit British people.

That's not going to happen though, because there are too many vested financial interests in digging a pointless new Trident money pit to shovel £billions into, and because there are an awful lot of people in Britain, and especially in the Westminster establishment club, who see international relations as some kind of dick waving competition where those with the biggest stockpiles of pointless Cold War relics have the most important voices.

So the conventional military is going to continue to be shrunk with one cut after another as it has been since the Tories came to power in 2010, British soldiers are going to continue to be sent into combat with inadequate equipment, and the country as a whole is going to continue suffering a debilitating lack of investment in infrastructure and services, all so that Theresa May and her successors can maintain the ability to trigger nuclear Armageddon.

They don't care about whether such weapons of mass destruction are necessary. Even if they do honestly believe that they are necessary, they don't give a hoot whether Trident renewal represents the best value for money, or whether a less expensive, more versatile weapons system could be developed.

The UK military-political-media establishment want the money to be wasted in this way, so it's going to happen no matter how little sense it makes, and anyone who dares object (for moral reasons, or on cost/feasibility grounds) will be routinely derided and condemned as raving extremists.

How the parties stand

Tories: The Tory party strongly favour renewing Trident, and are determined to press ahead with the Trident renewal vote in order to score political points against Labour, despite the fact that a lot of funding and technical issues remain completely unclear. Theresa May even tried fearmongering about the threat of Russia in order to justify the Tory stance that Trident renewal is the only option!

Labour: The Labour party is deeply divided on Trident. Jeremy Corbyn and a significant share of the party membership oppose Trident renewal as morally indefensible and/or a vast waste of money, but the majority of Labour MPs support the Tories writing a blank cheque for the private companies that stand to profit from Trident renewal.

UKIP: The 2015 UKIP manifesto pledged to scrap Trident renewal and invest in a cheaper more flexible form of nuclear deterrent, but like most of their manifesto the policy is lacking in specific detail.

SNP: The SNP are united in their opposition to Trident, and especially the location of the Trident nuclear base at Faslane, just 25 miles from Glasgow (Scotland's most populous city with 600,000+ inhabitants).

Liberal Democrats: The Lib-Dems want a "value for money" review to consider Trident renewal alongside alternatives to a like-for-like replacement.

Green Party: The Greens strongly oppose nuclear weapons and propose nuclear disarmament.

Plaid Cymru: The Welsh national party strongly oppose Trident renewal too.

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

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Why I oppose immigration detention camps

I am left-wing and I'm not ashamed of it. I get an awful lot of criticism from right-wing people, which is understandable given that I openly support ideas that they despise (such as nationalisation of natural monopolies, social justice, careful regulation of markets to minimise anti-competitive practices and the decentralisation of political power). However some of the very worst criticisms actually come from the political left. One example is a guy that has been waging a one man campaign of lies against me, endlessly repeating allegations that I "hate immigrants" (despite the fact that I've told him several times already that members of my immediate family are immigrants and that I've lived as an immigrant abroad on several occasions too) and making slanderous claims that I "support race camps" (by which he means immigration detention centres).

Here's a quote:

"Opposing immigration, in effect supporting the construction of race camps, watch towers and barriers and the empowerment of the police against the workers in general, is not "Left Libertarian".

Amazingly, several people have jumped to this guy's defence as if he has the right to make slanderous allegations against me which rely on nothing more than an intellectually lazy chain of thought, rather than anything remotely resembling actual evidence. It is as if his defenders believe that the onus is on me to defend myself against these unfounded allegations, rather than the onus being on him to properly defend his accusations with evidence. In essence, his defenders seem to believe that he is entitled to say what he likes without presenting any evidence, and that I am guilty until proven innocent.

Here's an example of this viewpoint:

"It sounds like someone got the better of you on an argument about immigration and you didn't really digest the criticism. Of course, I have no evidence supporting this since you didn't provide it. How about refuting the critics with arguments."

I thought the "argument" that I "support race concentration camps" was so incredibly poor that it was beneath logical analysis, but perhaps this guilty until proven innocent proposition is right, and I should refute these slanderous accusations with evidence and analysis.

Firstly, I do not "oppose immigration" as accused. That is a ludicrous misrepresentation of my views.

• I have often stated the fact that immigrants make a net positive economic contribution to the UK, and to UK society too (if nothing else than the glory of West Yorkshire curry houses!).
• I have written articles explicitly criticising the immigration system for being too draconian.
• I've often explained that the UK is facing a demographic time-bomb, and that increased immigration will be absolutely necessary if the baby boomer generation wish to enjoy the standards of living to which they've become accustomed, during their retirement years.
• I'm also more than happy to point out the evidence that, within the EU, immigrants are significantly less likely to claim social security than "natives".
• My support for the NHS is clear, and it is a fact that if all the immigrant workers in the NHS were sent home tomorrow, the institution would collapse.
• The guy (and his defenders) even know that immediate members of my family are immigrants, yet he continues to claim over and again that I "hate immigrants" and oppose all immigration.

His justification for the accusation that I support fascistic immigration detention camps seems to based on the fact that I oppose the current immigration system, which consists of an absurdly draconian and repressive immigration regime for Commonwealth and other non-EU citizens (unless of course the immigrant is stinking rich enough to pay a bribe to get in - as the rules allow) whilst simultaneously operating an "open door" immigration system for those from within the EU. He uses the fact that I oppose the way the immigration system works to claim that I support the infrastructure (G4S detention centres etc) of the regime that I oppose.

In my view this is transparently ludicrous stuff that anyone with a few brain cells should be able to see through with ease. Anyone that is familiar with my work knows that I oppose the neoliberal economic imperialism that creates the huge economic incentives for people to migrate to the pillager nations like the UK and US; that I strongly oppose state authoritarianism; and that I certainly oppose parasitic outsourcing companies like G4S and Serco - especially when they're making their taxpayer funded profits operating barbaric immigration detention camps, abusive child prisons and by blatantly defrauding the public too.
 
The argument that the onus is on me to defend myself (rather than for the other guy to support his allegations with evidence) seems to rest on the premise that because I haven't yet found the time to develop a detailed manifesto on what should be done with the immigration system (because I don't have all the answers and because it takes a lot of time and effort to come up with well considered solutions), it is somehow OK to for people to make slanderous comments about my support for the system that I have regularly criticised as socially and economically destructive, draconian, unjust and barbaric.

There is no logic behind the accusations this guy throws at me, and no evidence either. I find it disappointing that people would side with his unfounded, illogical and slanderous comments, when the onus surely should be on him to present some actual evidence to support his assertions that I support fascist internment camps, rather than nothing more than an intellectually lazy chain of thought.

I hope this adequately addresses any concerns you may or may not have had about my views on immigration. If it doesn't, then I suggest you unfollow my page and avoid reading my blog because you really shouldn't be following people if you seriously believe that they support fascist internment camps (despite having no real evidence to support such a belief).

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