Why genuine 'centrists' should be backing the left

For the last nine years Britain has been charging headlong to the far-right, with one increasingly militant Tory government after another.

In 2010 the Lib-Dems enabled the Tories back into power for the first time in 13 years, and the results were disastrous. The Lib-Dems voted through every single piece of wanton Tory ideological malice, including the austerity fanaticism that trashed our living standards and laid the groundwork for the Brexit backlash to happen.

The Lib-Dems love to pretend that they were some kind of wonderful moderating force, but the truth is easy to find. If we look at the absolute worst stuff the austerity coalition did, Lib-Dem fingerprints are all over all of it: Austerity fanaticism, unprecedented wage repression, disability persecution, NHS privatisation, catastrophic local government cuts, Bedroom Tax, 75% of secondary schools in England privatised, Theresa May's unlawfully racist Hostile Environment ...

And to make matters even worse leading Lib-Dems actually took personal responsibility for delivering the absolute worst of it, the most egregious examples being Vince Cable's outrageous decision to flog off our Royal Mail at miles below its true value to a bunch of city spivs, and Jo Swinson doing nothing whatever to stop the imposition of unlawful tribunal fees, despite being Employment Minister in the austerity coalition!

Things did get even worse after the Lib-Dem collapse in 2015 as the unrestrained Tories intensified the already unprecedented rate of privatisations, and imposed the most brutal social security cuts in the history of the welfare state, but it's beyond obvious that things could never have even got to that stage without the deliberate calculated collusion of the Lib-Dems.

Then in 2016 the Tories gambled away the nation's future on a ludicrous Brexit referendum in which the Leave option was left entirely undefined, allowing Brexiteers to cynically promise voters the moon on a stick, with absolutely no intention of following through on their false promises.

The day after his gamble backfired Cameron was gone, replaced by the fanatically right-wing wannabe tyrant Theresa May, who had all the hard-right politics, inflexible stubbornness, control-freakery, and authoritarianism of an all-powerful autocrat, but thankfully not the competence, or self-awareness, or discipline to actually follow through on her outrageous threats, or actually 'crush the saboteurs'.

May did manage to inflict even more ideological damage during her two year reign, not least her decision to starve the NHS of new recruits by wantonly scrapping NHS bursaries, creating a ticking time bomb of a recruitment crisis that will destroy the NHS if it is not resolved soon.

And now we have Boris Johnson, who is so wilfully intent on pandering to the far-right ultranationalist demographic that stalwarts of Conservatism who backed all of the austerity fanaticism, and wage repression, and welfare vadalism, and disability persecution, and public service cuts, and infrastructure under-investment are now fleeing the party in droves in absolute disgust at what it's becoming, including Johnson's own brother Jo.

It's mind-bogglingly obvious that the UK needs to rapidly abandon this race to the extreme-right fringe and reset back towards the centre ground. It's equally obvious that it's literally impossible to move away from the territory of the hard-right without moving somewhat to the left.

Thus there are actually two kinds of 'centrists'. One type who recognise the obvious truth that the UK needs to move significantly leftwards in order to gravitate back towards the traditional centre ground, and another smug, complacent, orthodox neoliberal bunch who just want to pause where we are with a "more of the same" agenda, enjoy the trappings of power for a few years, and then hand deliver power back to the next hard-right government that comes along.

The problem of course is that there's no commonly understood distinction between these two different kinds of 'centrism'.

There are those 'centrists' who believe in the mixed economy of socially owned infrastructure and services, and privately owned but well-regulated businesses, who believe Britain has gone way too far to the right.

And there are those 'faux centrists' who believe in always standing just a couple of milimetres to the left of the Tory party, no matter how far off to the crackpot far-right extreme they've gone, and never shifting an inch back towards where the traditional centre actually used to be.

Unfortunately an awful lot of the second kind of 'centrist' have made their home in the Liberal Democrats, hoping to turn it into a Conservatives MkII party to hold firm on the hard-right political territory, to keep the crushing living standards-destroying austerity coming, to keep the tax dodge loopholes open for the benefit of their mega-rich backers, and to keep annihilating the wages and working conditions of ordinary working people under the utterly misguided delusion that the best way to make the rich richer, is to force the poor and ordinary into destitution.

I'm as guilty as anyone for vehemently condemning this kind right-wing faux 'centrism', and maybe genuine 'centrists' who do actually recognise the need for a dramatic leftward turn back towards the centre ground might have felt caught in the crossfire as the left have repeatedly slammed the faux 'centrists' for their ludicrous pretence that their pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, anti-worker, welfare-vandalising, infrastructure under-investing, hard-right fanaticism is anywhere near the legitimate political centre.

I'm sorry if this is the case, and people who just wants things to return to normality feels caught in the crossfire.

It's just that a bunch of right-wing neoliberal militants intent on creating a veneer of legitimacy for their radical hard-right agenda by pretending that it's some kind of moderate, mainstream, centrist philosophy have stolen the positioning of legitimate 'centrists', who do actually recognise the need to rebalance somewhat towards the left.

Any legitimate 'centrist' really has to understand that millions of people in Britain literally can't afford yet more years of "more of the same" neoliberal orthodoxy shamelessly disguised as 'centrism'.

We need fundamental change to undo some of the worst hard-right excesses of the last decade; investment instead of austerity, a well earned wage rise for British workers, restoration of the wantonly vandalised social safety net, de-privatisation of police, hospitals, schools, and prisons, and de-centralisation of political power ...

Legitimate 'centrists' should be saying "no bloody way" to Jo Swinson and the Lib-Dems' transparent efforts to restructure their party as Conservatives 2.0 disguised as 'centrism' to dupe the gullible, and "yes please" to Labour's strategy of actually investing in Britain's future, and undoing as much of the hard-right Tory damage as they can.

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

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

21,000+ police jobs axed: 

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

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

Privatised front line policing:

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

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

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

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

Forensic Science Service privatisation:

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

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

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

Nobody charged in 91% of crimes: 

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

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

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

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

Dodgy facial recognition:

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

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

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

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

The tagging fraud:

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

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

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

Privatised prisons:

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

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

Legal Aid cuts:

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

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

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

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

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

Unlawful tribunal fees:

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

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

Privatised Probation Service:

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

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

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

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

Abolition of choice:

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

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

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

The prison book ban:

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

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

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

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

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

The hiring 20,000 police deception:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 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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Watch Jo Swinson lie through her teeth

The new Lib-Dem leader Jo Swinson has been getting a staggeringly easy ride from the mainstream media, and from smug blue tick Twitter "centrists" over her disgusting track record in government.

One of the commonest excuses that Lib-Dem tribalists wheel out is that the Lib-Dems somehow "moderated" the Tories by ... errr ... voting through all of their malice in order to avoid resigning as ministers in the 2010-15 austerity coalition.

Even when Swinson does receive a light grilling over her votes in favour of monstrous stuff like Bedroom Tax, rip-off tuition fees, and disability benefits cuts, the mainstream media hacks who are supposed to be holding her to account just let her lie through her teeth about other stuff.

One of Swinson's favourite lies is that she supposedly opposed imposing upfront £1,200 Tribunal Fees on workers seeking compensation from bad bosses who had exploited or abused them.

Jo Swinson VOTED IN FAVOUR of unlawful Tribunal Fees designed to protect bad bosses by pricing their exploited & abused workers out of the justice system.

If she actually opposed them she could have resigned as [checks notes] Employment Minister (!!!) in the Austerity Coalition. pic.twitter.com/eAOexqiIXI

— Another Angry Voice (@Angry_Voice) July 28, 2019

Swinson repeatedly claims that she opposed these fees, and even opportunistically joined in the celebrations when they were declared unlawful by the Supreme Court and scrapped in 2017.

But the reality is that Swinson actively voted in favour of this unlawful Tory assault on UK workers' right to seek justice against abusive and exploitative bosses.

Not only did she vote in favour of the policy, she also promoted the policy in press interviews and press releases.

If she knew that this policy was a despicable assault on workers' rights, yet she publicly promoted it and wilfully voted in favour of it, instead of resigning as Employment Minister over this scandalous policy, there's only one sensible explanation.

She decided against taking a stand because to do so would have meant giving up on her six figure ministerial salary, giving up her ministerial car and other perks, and giving up on her ambition to one day lead the Lib-Dem party.

She put her own personal enrichment and career prospects above the legal right to access the UK justice system for millions of British workers.

Yet instead of apologising for this disgusting decision, she resorts to revisionist lies that she opposed it all along.

And this Tribunal Fees situation perfectly illustrates what's so wrong with the Lib-Dem excuse that they somehow "moderated Tory excesses" during the austerity coalition.

The reality is that their new party leader had an absolutely golden opportunity as Employment Minister to stand up for British workers by resigning from her post in protest, but she chose not to for the benefit of her own career prospects.

And just like Swinson's revisionist lie that she opposed the unlawful tribunal Fees that she actually voted in favour of, the general Lib-Dem excuse that they "moderated the Tories" is also a revisionist fabrication. 

Choosing to govern with the Tories gave them the opportunity to moderate their malicious tendencies, but more often than not Swinson and her Lib-Dem colleagues wilfully rubber stamped the absolute worst of it, because to actually rebel would have cost them personally.

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How has Britain has become so normalised to Tory lawlessness and contempt for democracy?

To get a measure of how utterly normalised we've become to Tory lawlessness, just consider the fact that they became the first government in UK history to be held in contempt of parliament for deliberately refusing to comply with a parliamentary vote to release the legal advice they received on Brexit, and it's already been forgotten about within days.

This is always the case. Tory lawlessness and contempt for democracy always gets swept under the carpet and forgotten about.

• Remember when Theresa May and the Tories were defeated in the Supreme Court over their efforts to completely sideline parliament in order to make democratic opposition to Theresa May's hard-right Brexit scheming impossible? 

• Remember how the Tories' propaganda merchants in the right-wing rags triggered a tsunami of death threats and abuse against the judges who ruled that parliament is sovereign and Theresa May can't just make up Brexit as she goes along with no democratic scrutiny?

• Remember when the Tories introduced unlawful tribunal fees designed to protect bad bosses by pricing mistreated workers out of the justice system?

• Remember when the courts found that the draconian Tory Work Capacity Assessment regime for disabled people was unlawfully discriminating against those with mental health conditions, yet they carried on regardless?

• Remember when the Tories' ideologically driven benefit cap was declared unlawful by the courts for impoverishing single-parent families and causing misery "for no good reason"? 

• Remember when their policy of using the unemployed as a source of free labour for their corporate mates (Workfare) were repeatedly defeated in the courts?

• Remember when the Tories absolutely gutted Legal Aid in order to price poor and ordinary people out of the justice system and make it almost impossible for the victims of their malicious and unjust welfare policies to seek justice in the courts?

• Remember when unlawful Tory efforts to shut down Lewisham hospital were defeated in the courts? (so they simply rewrote the rules to make it much easier for them to shut down NHS facilities against the will of the local community).

• Remember when the Tories wasted £500,000 of public money in under a year challenging criticism of their track record on air pollution, resulting in a hat-trick of court defeats?

• And then there's all the blatantly fraudulent campaign spending the Tories did during the 2015 General Election (that they only got away with because the Electoral Commission are such a toothless and incompetent electoral regulator).

This is a government riddled with contempt for parliamentary democracy and contempt towards the rule of law, yet they're barely ever held to account for it by the mainstream media. And on the rare occasions that the public do actually hear about these extraordinary scandals, the tendency is to shrug it all off as if lawlessness, corruption and contempt for democracy are normal and unavoidable, rather than outrageous and unacceptable.

 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.

Theresa May's "feminism for the rich"

When the BBC announced the pay rates of their highest earning stars Theresa May was quick to wade into the debate to blast the gender disparity between the top earning male and female stars.

While the gender disparity amongst the top six-figure salary BBC stars is an issue, it's worth pointing out that Theresa May has absolutely no qualms about imposing policies that discriminate heavily against the poorest women in society.

Two high profile examples I mentioned at the time were the fact that 86% of the economic burden of Tory austerity dogma has been loaded onto the shoulders of women, and the Tory income requirements for non-EU spouses are twice as likely to force women to live in exile from the UK for the "crime" of falling in love with a foreigner as men*.

Another example of Tory discrimination against ordinary women has been catapulted into the news agenda as their outrageous anti-worker tribunal fees have been ruled unlawful by the Supreme Court on the grounds that the fees have the effect of preventing access to justice.

The Supreme Court ruling found that the Tory tribunal fee regime isn't just unlawful for preventing access to justice, but also because the way it puts women at a particular disadvantage is banned by the 2010 Equality Act.

The fact is that while Theresa May was crying tears of faux outrage about the earnings of extremely wealthy women earnings not matching the pay of extremely wealthy men, she was simultaneously fighting tooth and nail to preserve a system of tribunal fees that discriminates most heavily against low-income working women.

Just think about the searing hypocrisy of posing as a feminist when it comes to the salaries of some of the richest women in society whilst simultaneously battling all the way to the Supreme Court to defend her party's unlawful policy of pricing low income workers out of the justice system that hits the lowest income female workers the hardest of all.

This shocking hypocrisy from Theresa May is evidence that she's only a feminist if it's super-wealthy women like her facing injustice. If it's working-poor women facing injustice then she's determined to make the injustice even worse by deliberately pricing them out of the justice system when their bosses discriminate against them, sack them for getting pregnant or taking maternity leave, or sexually harass them at work.

Some people think that the misandrist anti-men ranters are the worst kind of feminists, but I disagree. These people certainly give feminists a bad name, but in reality they're not feminists at all, they're bigoted female supremacists.

The worst kind of feminist is the kind of feminist who only stands up for women's rights for their own elite class because they are totally and completely immune to their own privilege, or even worse, because they're driven by such hatred and contempt for "the lower orders" that they consider them unworthy of having the same rights as elites, like the right to freedom from discrimination for example.

Theresa May is a woman who is so riddled with elitism and class hatred that she's continued David Cameron's policy of economically persecuting low income women with austerity dogma to fund tax cuts for the mega-rich, and has fought tooth and nail all the way to the Supreme Court to continue the unlawful Tory policy of deliberately pricing low income female workers out of the justice system as a favour to bad employers.

She is only capable of caring about women's rights when it's comes to her own super-wealthy class because she believes in an elitist "feminism for the rich" where deliberate Tory gender discrimination against low-income female workers is perfectly fine as long as millionaire women have pay parity with millionaire men.

What's more Theresa May sees the even greater suffering faced by women in grotesque misogynistic societies like Saudi Arabia, or the women of Yemen suffering horrific Saudi war crimes, cholera and starvation as a small price worth paying in order to make £billions flogging the Saudis the British weapons they use to commit their war crimes with.

Theresa May doesn't give a damn about low income British women because she's a leading member of a political party that has been economically persecuting them and deliberately pricing them out of the justice system for years, and she gives even less of a damn about the even greater suffering of women in countries like Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

One of the most important things about feminism is recognising that the worst gender discrimination, misogyny and violence is almost always suffered by the most vulnerable women in society. 

Feminism isn't something that needs to be addressed top-down by ensuring gender parity amongst privileged millionaires as a priority, it's something that needs to be addressed from the bottom upwards by combating the harshest injustices as a priority, and one of the biggest obstacles to this bottom upwards approach to feminism is demonstrably Theresa May's Tory party.

It's beyond doubt that Theresa May believes in a sickeningly elitist form of feminism where women at the top of society deserve parity with men, but the lower down the social hierarchy, the fewer rights women deserve. 

She believes in this "feminism for the rich" so strongly that she actively and deliberately discriminates against low-income British women in numerous different ways whilst crying tears of outrage over the pay packets of millionaires.

In reality she gives so little concern to women she considers beneath her on the social hierarchy that she even wilfully colludes with the misogynistic Islamist tyrants who rule over Saudi Arabia.

Anyone who imagines that Theresa May is a legitimate feminist just because of her gender, or just because she cries faux tears of outrage over the suffering of her own elite class is a ridiculously gullible idiot who knows nothing about feminism whatever.

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* = During her time at the Home Office Theresa May was the actual architect of this deeply discriminatory policy of using economic apartheid rules to force British people to live in exile for the "crime" of falling in love with non-EU citizens. She doesn't give the slightest damn that these rules discriminate against women, especially women who live in poorer regions of the UK like the north east, south Wales, and Northern Ireland.