Why does Starmer keep insisting that the public are wrong?

Keir Starmer was elected as Labour leader on the back of 10 pledges, which promises party unity, the continuation of Corbynite policies, and a clear cut commitment to communal ownership of vital infrastructure and services like water, rail, and energy.

Starmer knew he couldn't win the Labour leadership without promising these things, because public ownership is not just overwhelmingly popular with the Labour Party members who were voting, they're popular policies across the entire British public.

Polling consistently demonstrates that overwhelming support for renationalisation of the energy sector, the water supply in England, and the railways.

In the two years after his election as Labour leader circumstances have handed Starmer a series of ideal opportunities to promote these overwhelmingly popular renationalisation policies.

Raw Sewage

In 2021 Johnson's Tory rabble triggered a massive public backlash when they voted to allow privatised water companies to keep artificially inflating their profits by dumping vast quantities of raw sewage into our waterways and coastal waters.

Starmer could easily have used this scandal to promote the popular policy of bringing England's privatised mess of water suppliers back under public ownership.

Instead he sent his subordinates out to argue that the profiteers must stay in charge of the water supply, in order to signal that Labour represents no threat to vested capitalist interests.

Energy Crisis

We've all seen the chaos of massively inflated energy bills, soaring energy producer profits, a sequence of energy suppliers going bust, and the government regulator forcing abandoned customers onto much more expensive tariffs.

Starmer could have highlighted the way the French government imposed a 4% cap on energy bill rises onto their publicly owned energy company (EdF), while the Tory government allowed EdF and other energy companies in the UK market to raise bills by an astonishing 54%.

He could have offered the public the renationalisation policies they want, but instead he decided to once again adopt the position that the public are wrong, and that the private profiteers must stay.

And Starmer didn't just spurn the opportunity to promote the energy renationalisation policies that the public want, and that he pledged in his leadership bid, he even publicly bragged that he lied in his leadership campaign, and insisted that he'd lie to people again to win more power!

Rail Strikes

Labour is supposed to be the party of working people (the clue is in the name), but Keir Starmer has decided to oppose the RMT rail strike against below-inflation pay offers and mandatory redundancies.

He's so vehemently opposed to the strikes that his minions are trying to force Labour MPs to apologise for showing solidarity with striking workers!

It's truly absurd to see Starmer's shadow cabinet team insisting that they won't support the strikes because they don't want to "pick a side".

It's capitalist profiteers and a profoundly malicious Tory transport secretary against ordinary low-paid rail workers (not train drivers).

If Labour won't even pick a side in this scenario, what the hell is the point in them.

And then the polling has come out to show that the British public are overwhelmingly on the side of the rail workers, meaning once again Starmer has positioned himself far to the right of public opinion.

Outflanking the public to the right

Despite pledging popular renationalisation policies in his leadership election, Keir Starmer has deliberately placed the Labour Party well to the right of the British public on water, energy, and now rail.

Instead of offering the public what they want, Starmer is siding with the capitalist profiteers and insisting that the public are wrong to want things to just be a bit better and fairer for British consumers and British workers.

Starmer's dedicated to the protection of vested capitalist interests, so he's going to keep Labour positioned well to the right of public opinion; offer a bland and uninspiring "more of the same" policy platform; and hope that he can win the next election purely by not being quite as repulsive and divisive as Johnson.

It looks a lot like a deliberate attempt to replay Ed Miliband's catastrophically uninspiring 2015 Tory-lite election campaign, in which Labour decided to pathetically imitate Tory austerity ruination, rather than opposing it and pledging to invest for the future instead.

It seems an absurdly inexplicable strategy to repeatedly chide the public that they're wrong to want things to be a bit better, and then expect them to vote for you regardless.

Unless of course Starmer considers the protection of capitalist profiteering to be so important that he'd risk driving millions of traditional Labour voters away, and throwing an election over it.

And if that's the case, what the hell is this absurd person doing as leader of the Labour Party?

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The Tories are claiming that cycling to work instead of driving causes congestion and air pollution!

The latest anti-Labour Tory attack line is so unbelievably stupid that you have to see it to believe it.

The Kensington and Chelsea Tories have been handing out flyers attacking the development of London's cycle infrastructure with absurd claims that measures to increase the number of people cycling to work instead of driving will increase "traffic congestion" and "air pollution".

Air pollution and traffic jams

Now, every evidence-based air pollution study I've ever seen on improved cycling and walking infrastructure has detailed massive reductions in air pollutants like nitrogen oxides, particulate matter, and black carbon.

According to a study by Sustrans, if the number of UK cycling trips could be doubled, and the number of short walking trips increased, this would produce such a significant reduction in air pollution that 8,300 lives a year would be saved.

Aside from the improvements in air quality and life expectancy, their study estimated a £5.67 billion boost to the UK over the course of 10 years. 

These are huge quality of life improvements with a significant economic benefit to boot, all for a relatively modest initial outlay in infrastructure improvements (the £42 million the Tories are shitting themselves with rage over is significantly less than 0.1% of the projected cost of HS2).

Research into a similar Cycle Highways scheme in the Netherlands found that the construction of 675 km of cycle highways resulted in a 3.8 million hours per year reduction in traffic jams!

Another study in Waltham Forest demonstrated a massive reduction in severe air pollution after the introduction of a Mini-Holland cycling infrastructure plan.

And another study in Washington DC indicated a 4% reduction in traffic congestion that was directly attributable to their Capital Bikeshare scheme.

If the Tories want to claim that improved cycling infrastructure increases traffic congestion and air pollution, they really need to show some counter-evidence to the numerous studies demonstrating the exact opposite effect.

Local Businesses

The claimed "damage to local businesses" is at least just misleading, rather than an outright inversion of reality.

Of course some local businesses may be inconvenienced during the construction phase, but you'd have to be utterly delusional to believe that more people walking and cycling along your street, rather than driving through in cars, would be a bad thing for local shops and businesses in the long run.

Trees

As for the tree removals that the Tories seem so upset about, I'm pretty sure the reduction in CO2 emissions from reduced car trips and traffic jams would be more than enough to offset the loss of a few trees, and if the Tories really did give a damn about trees, they could easily demand that the developers plant two or more trees in the local area for every one they need to remove.

The Tories obviously don't give a shit about trees, they've just added it because a list with two bullet points (one of which is the most absurd of lies) would have looked absolutely ridiculous.

True motivations

The worst thing about this Tory nonsense is that we know what all of this is really motivated by.

The Tories are blatantly pandering to car users because they know the kind of people driving massive pollutant-billowing SUVs around London are one of their core demographics.

Their attitude is screw people on bikes, and those in the poorer areas of London who are far more likely to suffer toxic levels of pollution, they're never going to vote Tory anyway, so "fuck them".

In fact the Tories have such contempt for people living in high pollution areas that Boris Johnson and his Tory minions deliberately buried a damning study about the dangerously high levels of toxic air pollution in London for several years, rather than do anything about it.

The Tories obviously don't give a damn about air pollution, or congestion, or trees, they simply want to disguise their real car-supremacist agenda with a load of misleading drivel instead of being honest about it.

So fuck all the people who would like to cycle to work but don't feel willing to risk their lives because the current infrastructure is too dangerous. Fuck all the kids with asthma and allergies that are triggered and exacerbated by air pollution. Fuck the thousands who die each year because of the filthy air in our cities.

As far as the Tories are concerned the car is king, and car drivers are the only demographic they're interested in pandering to, and they're going to pander so hard they're resorting to outright and easily disprovable lies.

What a noxious bunch they are.

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Who is the most incompetent Tory government minister?

The modern Conservative Party is a microcosm of all that's gone so wrong in modern Britain. The vast majority of the top positions have been gobbled up by wealthy, over-entitled elitists with establishment connections, and there's practically no social mobility within the party to provide competition to replace people who are manifestly incompetent, so there's basically no getting rid of the people who created the appalling situation we're in.

Background

David Cameron bears a lot of responsibility for the state of things given his extraordinarily lax attitude towards the incompetence of his ministers:

• George Osborne's austerity agenda completely failed to eliminate the deficit by 2015 as he promised it would (current Tory deficit elimination projection 2031, or 21 years to do what they said they'd achieve in under 5). 

• Theresa May cocked up one piece of legislation after another, introduced the horrific "hostile environment" policies that created the Windrush scandal, and failed her (ridiculous and arbitrary) promise to cut net migration to below 100,000 so badly that net migration reached an all time high. 

• And even the legendarily incompetent Iain Duncan Smith was allowed to continue maliciously and incompetently wrecking the lives of sick, disabled, and jobless people until he resigned just before the Brexit vote in order to damage Cameron as much as possible.

Since Theresa May took over the lax Tory attitude towards incompetence is even worse, especially since May threw away her majority in 2017 and left herself relying on the sectarian DUP bigots to cling to power. Even if she had the will to discipline errant and incompetent MPs, she's definitely not got the authority.

Take Boris Johnson's continual array of gaffes and errors as Foreign Secretary that even led to a jailed British citizen in Iran having their sentence increased. Take Gavin Williamson's utterly pathetic "Russia should go away and shut up" comment that made Britain look a laughing stock for having such a jumped up little squit as their Defence Secretary. And take the way the DWP minister Esther McVey has been allowed to totally get away with barefaced lying to the House of Commons with no punishment.

The contenders

Karen Bradley

Karen Bradley was appointed Northern Ireland Secretary in January 2018. She was always an odd choice for the job given the difficulties involved: Brexit and the Irish border question, the absolute deadlock in the Northern Irish devolved parliament, the massive increase in sectarianism, and the very real risk to the peace process caused by the DUP propping up the UK government while the territory is effectively under indefinite "home rule".

Given the seriousness of the circumstances one would have expected an experienced heavy-hitter to take on the role, but instead Theresa May passed it off to the shockingly lightweight but pliable and subservient Karen Bradley.

In September 2018 Bradley made the shocking admission that she didn't even know that Northern Irish politics is divided on sectarian lines. That's the kind of absolute basic that anyone who pays the remotest attention to Northern Irish news understands, not the kind of thing the actual government minister for Northern Ireland was completely ignorant of.

Chris Grayling

When Theresa May became Prime Minister her decision to appoint Chris Grayling as her Transport Minister was a signal of the absolute contempt she has towards public transport users, because his woeful track record in other departments has earned him the nickname "failing Grayling".

As minister for Employment in Cameron's government he introduced unlawful tribunal fees to deter workers from seeking recompense when sacked by bad bosses. The messes he made in the Ministry of Justice were even worse, with his spectacularly botched privatisation of the Probation Service still creating headaches for his successors to this day.

At Transport "failing Grayling" has truly excelled himself, presiding over two simultaneous farces with Southern Rail and Northern Rail services in chaos, meanwhile he ended up having to return the flagship East Coast Mainline to public ownership for a third time as yet another private operator ran away rather than face making losses on the contract they signed.

When it comes to the ever increasing threat of a chaotic "no deal" Tory Brexit Britain faces huge challenges when it comes to issues like aviation, shipping, licencing issues for hauliers, and the infrastructure for customs checks at UK borders. You really couldn't think of a worse person to deal with all these complexities than a serial failure like Chris Grayling.

Liam Fox

Shortly after Theresa May appointed the disgraced Liam Fox as her International Trade minister he bragged that securing a trade deal with the EU would be "the easiest in human history".

Fast forward two years and Fox is claiming that there's now a 60-40 chance of the UK crashing out of the EU with no deal at all, and attempting to cast blame onto the EU negotiating team for his shocking complacency, and his abject failure to get to grips with his brief.

Theresa May

Theresa May's 2017 vanity election will surely go down in history as an examplar of political hubris. She had the comfort of a reasonable majority until 2020, but she somehow decided to gamble it in the hope of achieving a landslide election victory and a super-majority so that she could conduct Brexit as an unstoppable hard-right autocrat.

Amazingly Theresa May learned nothing from David Cameron's spectacularly misjudged Brexit gamble that was only intended to win a few votes off UKIP at the 2015 General Election, not throw the entire nation into years of turmoil.

Having learned nothing about the inherent risks of political gambling from the demise of her predecessor she threw away her parliamentary majority with another ridiculously ill-judged gamble of her own.

But aside from her ridiculous vanity election there's another telling issue. There's the fact that she is personally responsible for the appointment of all three of the other candidates in this list.

Conclusion

There are strong cases to be made for all four of the candidates for most incompetent Tory minister, but since one of them is directly responsible for the appointment of the other three, so she's surely got to be the leading candidate.

Anyhow, feel free to vote in my Twitter poll on which one of them is the worst of all.

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The Tory rail privatisation disaster

When the Tories were introducing their ideologically driven and hopelessly botched plan to privatise the UK rail network the Tory Transport Secretary John MacGregor claimed that passengers would benefit from reduced fares.

Anyone who understood the basics of monopolies (captive markets) knew that MacGregor's promises were fantastical nonsense. Once a monopoly service is handed to a private profit-seeking entity, prices are certain to rise because there's no price competition in a captive market.

Two decades after rail privatisation the average train fare has increased by 117% (24% adjusted for inflation). On some journeys fares have increased by well over 200%.

Aside from the direct hit to passengers' wallets, there's also the fact that the private rail operators are being showered with £billions in direct and indirect taxpayer subsidies.

Annual direct subsidies to the private rail franchises far exceed the total cost of running the entire UK rail network back when it was run as a not-for-profit public service!

Aside from the direct subsidies there is also the issue of the indirect subsidy that occurs because the publicly owned rail infrastructure company (Network Rail) allows the private rail franchises to use the tracks at significantly below the actual cost of maintaining them.

Hiring out the tracks at way below market value in order to secure the profitability of the private train operators has meant that Network Rail has built up a vast debt mountain of £41 billion.

This is about as clear an example as possible of the Tory ideology of privatising the profits and nationalising the debts as it's possible to see.

Aside from costing far more in direct and indirect subsidies, the privatised rail franchises do far less than British Rail with all of that extra money.

Before privatisation British Rail designed and developed new trains, including many that are still in service today generating huge profits for their private operators. Privatisation of the UK rail network put a swift end to Britain being a world-leader in train building.

Immediately after privatisation the private franchises were so intent on reaping as much profit as possible out of the old taxpayer-funded rolling stock that there wasn't a single new train order for 1,064 days, causing the absolute annihilation of the UK train building industry.

These days the UK buys most of its new trains from Germany, Japan, China and even Italy, which is an absolutely shameful state of affairs for the country that invented the railway and was a world leader in trainbuilding well into the 1980s.

The abject failure of rail privatisation is perhaps the most glaring example of all amongst a litany of other woeful Tory privatisation scams, yet the Tories will never undo their mistake because they're ideologically opposed to British infrastructure being owned by the British public and operated on their behalf.

In fact the Tories have such a strong ideological opposition to British infrastructure and services being owned by the British people that they would demonstrably prefer our rail infrastructure to be owned and operated by foreign states like Germany, France, Netherlands, Hong Kong and Singapore. 

Just a few decades ago a government would be considered shockingly treasonous for promoting a policy of prohibiting the British from owning our own rail network so that it can be used as a cash cow by foreign states. 

But these days, thanks to the Tory rail privatisation scam, it's not just a crackpot policy that would have been shouted down as anti-British lunacy in the past, it's the actual reality!

Tory rail privatisation has been an absolute failure for everyone apart from the profiteering rail franchises and train leasing companies. Passengers have suffered massive ticket price inflation and ever more over-crowded and unsafe conditions; the taxpayer continues to pay far more in subsidies than the total cost of running British Rail in the past; Network Rail is sitting on a £41 billion debt mountain; the UK train building industry has been annihilated; and railway staff have suffered over two decades of declining wages and worsening working conditions.

The two political parties that deserve credit for promoting the extremely popular policy of rail renationalisation are Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party and the Green Party (who supported rail renationalisation back when the New Labour mob were still pushing disgusting neoliberalism-lite gruel on the public under Miliband and Balls).

Let's hope that someone with some sense actually moves to sort out this festering Tory blight on our nation soon.

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Tory government minister sets up petition against consequences of own party's austerity fixation

A Tory government minister has set up a Change.org petition to protest against cuts to the funding of local Staffordshire bus services that are being made by his local Tory council as a result of the massive unprecedented local government funding cuts being imposed by the Tory government he's part of.

The Tory MP in question is Theresa May's darling and spectacularly under-qualified Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson, and he really doesn't seem to have a clue.

Instead of setting up a petition on a website that absolutely nobody is obliged to take account of, he could actually use his position in government to pressure his colleagues to reverse their ruinous campaign of local government funding cuts.

Not many people understand how severe these ideologically driven Tory cuts to local government budgets are, but Williamson has no excuse for ignorance because he's a member of the political party that voted to approve them, and a member of the government that is currently implementing them.

The Tory fixation with ruinous austerity dogma means that they're already cut the local government budget by 67% since they came to power in 2010, and they're planning on slashing even more in an effort to reduce the Department for Communities and Local Government budget from £12.9 billion in 2015/16 to just £5.3 billion by 2020.

It's the usual Tory way to ensure that by far the heaviest cuts land on non-Tory councils (Labour, Lib-Dem, SNP, Plaid Cymru) but when they're slashing local government budgets by an extraordinary 67%, there's no way that Tory councils won't end up feeling some of the bite too.

In fact the Tory run Northamptonshire Council was the first to go slump into de facto bankruptcy when they admitted in February 2018 that they're unable to meet their financial obligations. Yet the austerity dogma driven Tory campaign of cuts to local government funding continue regardless.

This extraordinary campaign of Tory austerity cuts is the most fundamental reason that local councils all over the UK are slashing funding for local bus services; failing to provide social care to the elderly; closing libraries, swimming pools, leisure centres, and countless other local services; flogging off public property and infrastructure to speculators; reducing bin collection services; dramatically scaling back highways maintenance; barely cutting the grass in summer; taking ages over planning decisions because they've laid off so many planning staff; closing all their public toilets; and teetering on the edge of total bankruptcy.

The truly sad thing is that many people are so politically disengaged/under-informed that they don't even realise that the crucial reason their local services have deteriorated so dramatically (while their Council Tax bills are actually rising) is the continuing Tory fixation with ruinous austerity dogma in central government.

Yet this odious Tory squit who has backed this unspeakably destructive campaign of ideologically driven austerity fanaticism to the hilt is setting up a petition to pretend that he's actually a good guy who cares abut the delivery of local services!

And it's beyond doubt that a load of gullible Tory voting drones in Staffordshire will fail to spot the trail of causation that flows directly back to the Tory government's fixation with austerity dogma, and they'll continue to vote Tory at the local level.

And come the next General Election they'll continue to vote for economic vandals like Gavin Williamson to continue pushing their devastating hard-right austerity dogma in central government, even as they chunter on about the massive deterioration in their local government services.

All we can do about it is to try to counter their economic ignorance and party political tribalism by campaigning as hard as possible against the Tories in areas where there's a chance of beating them, so that we can put an end to their ideologically driven and endlessly self-defeating campaign of social and economic destruction and begin investing in our country again before it's truly too late to reverse the damage.

 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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12 reasons Chris Grayling was an absolutely dreadful Justice Secretary

The fact that a serial failure like Chris Grayling still has an important cabinet position is indicative of the absolute dearth of talent in the Tory party.

Grayling started off as one of Iain Duncan Smith's henchmen at the DWP, the then spent three years as the worst Secretary of State for Justice imaginable.

Despite his almost unbreakable tolerance for abject incompetence from his ministers* David Cameron finally saw sense in 2015 and moved Grayling into largely ceremonial roles where he had little ability to wreak havoc over ordinary people's lives.

After David Cameron's EU gamble backfired so spectacularly Theresa May gave Grayling a lifeline back into a position where he could cause more damage by making him Transport Secretary.

Since then he has bee pursuing policies like handing the Southwestern franchise to the Chinese government to operate (because Tory ideology prohibits the UK state from running UK transport networks, but is fine with the Chinese state running UK transport networks!), deciding to hand operation of the UK taxpayer funded HS2 line directly to foreign governments to profiteer from (France, China and Italy are the bidders), and sneakily cancelling several rail electrification upgrades in Wales and the north of England just days before parliament went off on summer break.

Here's a recap of 12 things that make Chris Grayling not only the worst Justice Secretary ever, but possibly even the worst government minister in David Cameron's dreadful coalition of failure with the Lib-Dems.

Unqualified

Since 2007 the role of Secretary of State for Justice has included the job of Lord Chancellor. Before David Cameron appointed Chris Grayling to the position, every single Lord Chancellor for centuries had been a qualified legal professional. 

Grayling was the first head of the legal system to have no legal qualifications whatever, and this Tory anti-expertise trend has continued after his departure in 2015.

Grayling's successor Michael Gove was the 2nd unqualified Lord Chancellor in modern history, Gove's successor Liz Truss was the 3rd, and her successor David Liddington is the 4th legally unqualified Lord Chancellor in succession.

Unlawful Tribunal fees

It's taken four years and an epic battle all the way up to the Supreme Court to get Chris Grayling's discriminatory anti-worker employment tribunal fees declared unlawful (thanks to Unison for fighting to protect workers' rights).

Despite their claims to the contrary this legislation was always intended as a bad bosses' charter to give terrible employers the freedom to abuse their low-income workers and sack them at will, safe in the knowledge they wouldn't be able to afford the employment tribunal fees.

Not only did these fees act as a deliberate Tory barrier to the justice system for low-income workers, they also demonstrably discriminated against women. It's telling that instead of quitly backtracking on this depraved policy of pricing people out of seeking justice Theresa May carried on fighting tooth and nail to keep these sexist Tory rules in place long after Grayling was gone.

Probation service privatisation

Chris Grayling's ideologically driven privatisation of the probation service was criticised at the time as a reckless gamble, and the resulting chaos is probably even worse than predicted.

Grayling decided that the taxpayer should keep responsibility for probation services for long-term prisoners while probation services for prisoners sentenced to a year or less were carved up and distributed to 21 different private outsourcing companies.

A 2016 report found that ex-prisoners are being failed and the public put at risk. Of the 86 released prisoners the research team investigated not a single one of them had any help in relation to training, education or employment. A third were released with nowhere to live, and one registered sex offender simply disappeared after release.

Legal aid cuts

Legal Aid is a fundamental part of the modern welfare system which prevents the justice system from being just a plaything of the rich by providing adequate legal representation to people from poor and ordinary backgrounds.

Grayling is a fanatical right-winger so he attacked legal aid funding with glee, stripping legal aid entitlement from all kinds of cases. The result was a predictable rise in the percentage of people attempting to represent themselves in court, meaning thousands upon thousands of wasted hours in court (especially family courts) as proceedings had to be abandoned due to procedural cockups from self-representing legal novices.

Aside from the costs and the wasted time, there's also the fact that unknown thousands have been denied justice altogether as they simply gave up on the idea of seeking legal redress for the injustices they've suffered for lack of legal representation.

Restrictions on legal aid for domestic violence victims

As part of Grayling's assault on legal aid he decided to slash women's entitlement to legal aid for domestic violence cases.

If a woman couldn't prove that they'd been subjected to domestic abuse with either medical evidence or legal records from the previous five years they wouldn't get legal aid. This attack on domestic violence victims was widely condemned at the time, and in February 2017 it was finally reversed when the government caved into the pressure to accept evidence from charities, solicitors and housing officers.

Tendering for legal aid contracts

Aside from cutting legal aid to the bone another of Chris Grayling's brainwaves was to introduce tendering for legal aid services, so that people needing legal aid would have no longer have freedom to chose their own lawyer (from a local company, or from a firm of legal specialists in the field required) and simply be handed one from a pre-approved government list.

This planned shakeup was designed to benefit big legal companies and drive small independent legal practices out of business. One of the big players in this get-what-you're given strategy was, believe it or not, the haulage company Eddie Stobart!

Thankfully Grayling's successor Michael Gove listened to the absolute chorus of condemnation from the legal profession and scrapped Grayling's madcap plans.

Selling prison advice to the Saudi tyrants

One of Grayling's most widely condemned schemes was the establishment of a shady commercial offshoot of the Justice Department called Justice Solutions International which won a £5.9 million contract to advise the brutal Islamist tyrants in Saudi Arabia how to run their prisons.

In October 2015 Jeremy Corbyn forced one of his first significant U-turns out of the Tory government by calling for the contract with the Saudi tyrants to be scrapped, which Grayling's successor Michael Gove eventually did due citing "human rights concerns".

Criminal court fees

In 2015 Chris Grayling introduced fees for defendants found guilty at a magistrates court to pay £150 and those convicted at crown court to hand over £1,200.

People complained that the fees were incentivising innocent people to plead guilty to crimes they didn't commit out of fear of being hit with Grayling's fees if they tried to plead their innocence.

Over 100 magistrates resigned over the charges. Grayling's successor Michael Gove scrapped the charges saying the "intent has fallen short".

Cutting legal aid for prisoners

Chris Grayling loved playing up to the hard-right press by devising policies to be tough on prisoners. One of these schemes was a 2013 ruling banning legal aid for prisoners.

In my view you don't have to be a tree-huggling liberal leftie to believe that a prisoner who has been denied any kind of education, offender behaviour programmes or training while locked up should have the right to seek legal intervention to ensure they do get the help they need to avoid re-offending in the future.

In 2017 Grayling's cuts to legal aid for prisoners were ruled unlawful and overturned.

Banning books

Another of Grayling's attacks on the prison population was his ruling banning them from receiving books. This one really hit the headlines because there's nothing quite as right-wing authoritarian as banning books.

In December 2014 a High Court ruling found that banning prisoners from receiving books was unlawful, and Grayling's successor Michael Gove sensibly decided not to bother appealing against the judgement and binned the policy.

Unlawful prison absconder policy

One of Grayling's most ridiculous blunders came when he decided to introduce a knee-jerk policy after the right-wing press whipped up a huge fuss when an armed robber called Michael "Skullcracker" Wheatley went on the run from day release.

Grayling's new policy was to rush through a ban on any prisoner who had absconded from serving in open prison. The problem was that this new policy glaringly contradicted a previous Grayling policy that inmates serving indeterminate sentences should go through a phased release from closed to open prisons "in order to test their readiness for release into the community".

In 2015 Grayling's knee-jerk prisoner absconder policy was declared unlawful at the High Court after a case was brought by a prisoner called John Gilbert who technically absconded from day release because he missed his last train, but handed himself into a police station first thing in the morning.

The judges said the inconsistency between Grayling’s new absconder policy and his long-standing directions to the parole board was "irrational", and they were also "not impressed" by Grayling's absurd claim that since the ban and the parole board directions had both been issued by him, he had the power to ignore or contradict either of them at will!

Making Michael Gove look good

Michael Gove is a Rupert Murdoch hack turned politician. As education secretary he vandalised the education system by privatising thousands of state schools into the hands of unaccountable private psuedo-charities (many operated by major Tory party donors). He also oversaw a proliferation of unqualified teachers into our classrooms and once famously claimed that all schools should attain above average status!

The fact that a bumbling right-wing fanatic like Michael Gove had to come in and clear up so many of Grayling's messes just goes to show how utterly crap he must have been.

Just imagine how ideologically extreme and incompetent a person would have to be in order to end up making a right-wing fruit loop like Michael Gove look level-headed and competent in comparison!

 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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* = Despite their serial incompetence Iain Duncan Smith, George Osborne and Theresa May were never sacked, but Grayling's monumental blunders at Ministry of Justice were so huge, and so regular that even David Cameron couldn't ignore them.

Scottish independence and the "heavy price" of voting no

According to the IPPR Future of England survey 2014, I'm in a small minority of Englishmen who support Scottish independence. Just 19% of respondents to the Future of England survey were in favour, which makes me one of the few English people who support the idea of greater autonomy and increased political accountability north of the border.

The findings of this survey paint an ugly picture of England as a land filled with bitter, resentful and vindictive people, seething with anger at the audacity of the Scots for even daring consider an escape from the misrule of the Westminster establishment.

What is much more concerning than the fact that the majority of the English oppose Scottish independence, is the fact that a clear majority believe that the Westminster establishment should punish the people of Scotland with huge funding cuts should they vote against independence in the referendum. The mainstream media has described this attitude as "the English" seeking a "heavy price" for the independence referendum.

The motivation behind this common English desire to have Scottish funding cut by some £4 billion to bring per capita spending down to the UK average, is the pervasive media narrative that the Scottish are a bunch of "subsidy junkies".

A brief look at the actual facts reveals that Scotland does indeed benefit from slightly higher per capita government spending than the UK average, however Scotland also has a much higher per capita GDP than the rest of the UK, thanks largely to the revenues from Scottish oil and gas. Once the proceeds from oil and gas are added into the equation it turns out that tax revenues in Scotland are nearly 20% higher than the UK average which would make slightly higher public spending seem pretty fair.

Once the supply of North Sea oil begins to dwindle, Scotland also has huge renewable energy potential, including some 25% of EU offshore wind potential, 25% of EU tidal potential, and 10% of EU hydroelectric potential.

These vast supplies of actual and potential energy reserves make Scotland a very wealthy country indeed, however a great swathe of the English public seem to believe that the Scottish people should be denied the benefits of all of this Scottish energy wealth so that it can be distributed to the people of England instead.


One of the most absurd things about this English bitterness towards Scotland is the way that they completely overlook the fact that government spending in London is much higher than the levels of public spending in Scotland that the mainstream media have whipped them up into a frenzy of bitterness and jealousy about.

The disparity in public spending between London and the rest of England is so enormous that more than half of England's infrastructure budget is spent just in London and the South East. To put this into perspective, the annual investment in transport infrastructure in the North East of England is just £246 per person, while the annual amount in London is £4,895!

You'd have to be a particularly one-eyed Englishman to allow the mainstream media to whip you up into a frenzy over the fact that average public spending in Scotland is slightly higher than the average for England, without realising, or caring, that vastly more public money is poured into London than anywhere else, including Scotland (and that's without even adding the £1.5 trillion in public money that was sunk into the City of London financial sector to save the bankers from the consequences of their own reckless gambling into the equation).

When the majority of English people demand that the level of Scotland's per capita government spending is reduced to the UK average, what they are actually demanding is that the Scottish public be denied the economic benefits of their own abundance of natural resources, so that the benefits can be redistributed to England instead. In order to adopt this absurd "It's not fair that Scotland gets more" position, they have to completely ignore the elephant in the room, which is the vastly bigger disparity that exists between government spending in London, compared with the rest of England.

What makes this common English "punish them if they vote no" attitude so much worse is the fact that the majority of respondents to the IPPR survey also want to see the Westminster establishment use its powers to obstruct an independent Scotland by trying to force them out of the EU and other international institutions, and by attempting to prevent them from using the pound (even though that would be impossible because the pound is a fully tradeable international currency). 

This "punish them whatever they decide to do" stance actually makes a very strong argument in favour of Scottish independence. Not only do a majority of my fellow Englishmen want Scotland to vote no to independence because they feel a sense of entitlement to the revenues from Scottish natural resources, they also want Westminster to attempt to severely punish the people of Scotland for their audacity, should they dare vote yes to independence.

It seems that the majority of my fellow Englishmen are not very nice bedfellows at all. The fact that most of my countrymen oppose Scottish independence isn't all that much of a problem, after all, everyone is entitled to their opinion. What is completely unacceptable is the ridiculous sense of entitlement that so many English people seem to have towards the proceeds from Scottish natural resources, and the blatantly vindictive "punish them whatever they decide to do" attitudes they hold towards the people of Scotland.

All three of the Westminster establishment parties have been offering Scotland "jam tomorrow" promises of more decision making powers for Scotland should the people of Scotland vote no to independence, however the results of this survey show that the English electorate are baying for Scottish blood. It seems extremely likely that any further devolution of powers would also see massive cuts in Scottish public spending, imposed in order to appease the much larger English electorate.

The only way for the people of Scotland to ensure that the economic benefits of their abundant natural resources are not redistributed to England is to vote in favour of independence. The majority of my fellow Englishmen want to see the people of Scotland punished whatever they decide to do, and should the Scottish people vote against independence, it's quite clear that it would come at a "heavy price".

The results of this survey are an embarrassment to England. They paint us as a selfish, resentful and vindictive bunch with an intense loathing for the Scottish, however I'm proud to be one of the minority of English people who support the idea of Scottish independence, and wish the people of Scotland all the best for the future, no matter what the outcome of the independence referendum.

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