Just a few days ago I warned that it was only a matter of time before Remainers came up with an even stupider idea than cobbling together some kind of unelected "foil Brexit at any cost" coalition led by some Remain-fixated backbencher that virtually nobody has heard of, and allowing Boris sodding Johnson to colonise the moral high ground.
Within days my prediction has come true. They've done it again!
Painting yourselves as the avowed anti-democrats intent on foiling Brexit by any means and allowing Johnson to stroll onto the moral high ground would be extraordinary strategic ineptitude, but ex-Tory constituency squatter MP Heidi Allen has come up with an even stupider strategy: Let Boris Johnson and the Brextremists crash the UK out of the EU in a ruinous No Deal Brexit meltdown, then simply undo the damage later using retroactive legislation!
As an ex-Tory you can see why she thinks this is a solution, after all, she repeatedly voted in favour of using retroactive legislation to cover up their own criminality, from retroactive legislation to magically make Iain Duncan Smith's unlawful forced unpaid labour schemes lawful, to the emergency retroactive legalisation they used to retrospectively legalise the UK state's unlawful snooping on its own citizens.
The problem of course is that the idea of retroactively reversing No Deal is dangerously legally-illiterate gibberish.
If Remainers simply allow Boris Johnson and the Brextremists to conduct a 'No Deal by default' meltdown, the UK will have legally left the EU, and put itself in an extraordinarily weak negotiating position.
Even if the UK parliament does cobble together some absurd retroactive legislation aimed at retracting our departure as if it never happened, it quite obviously wouldn't bind the EU into letting us back into their club under the previously favourable conditions.
Even if retroactively pretending that we didn't actually leave wasn't wishing for unicorns from a legal perspective, why on earth would the EU just let us back in when we'd have put ourselves in the unprecedentedly weak position of having no trade deal with them, and no trade deals with anyone else either?
If we wanted to get back in, we'd be in the position of pathetically begging them, and they'd be under no obligation whatever to give us back the extremely favourable deal we'd just thrown away.
And ludicrous retroactive efforts to force them to give us back what we just threw away would serve as a further national humiliation as the rest of Europe laughed away our impotent legally-illiterate efforts to bully them from our self-imposed position of weakness.
Even if it wasn’t legally-illiterate gibberish, the idea that No Deal could simply be undone is as delusional as the idea that the damage from austerity fanaticism could just be undone by stopping the cuts.
The shattered businesses, and lost jobs, wasted £billions, and millions of hours mitigating the chaos under a No Deal meltdown wouldn’t just magically grow back, just like the 130,000 dead from austerity cuts to the NHS and social care won’t magically rise from the grave.
This idea of retroactively cancelling No Deal is utterly absurd from a legal and practical perspective, but it's also incredibly dangerous.
It's dangerous because it creates the impression among Remainers that a No Deal Brexit meltdown can just be undone using a bit of legislative trickery.
'Just legislate that our decision to leave didn't actually happen and the whole thing just goes away!'
'No Deal Brexit isn't really a threat because we can magic it away in the future!'
'Let's just let Boris Johnson and the Brextremists push the UK economy over a No Deal cliff edge, then we can retroactively fix all the damage later!'
These are staggeringly dangerous, complacency-breeding, lines of thought.
If you're gullible enough to take centrists like Lib-Dems and CUK squatters at their word that stopping No Deal is their main priority, then letting No Deal happen based on the absolute fantasy that it can supposedly be reversed later via legislative trickery seems like utter nonsense.
But it's actually fairly easy to see what this utterly lamentable gibberish is motivated by.
Pro-austerity, privatisation scamming, welfare-vandalising, disability-persecuting, Corporate Tax cutting, public service trashing, workers' rights attacking, orthodox neoliberal centrists fear the idea of Jeremy Corbyn derailing their gravy train even more than they fear a No Deal Brexit (which will mainly hammer the poor and ordinary, not the Westminster establishment club and the other gilded classes).
In order to justify their outright refusal to work with Corbyn and the Labour left to stop a ruinous Tory-administered No Deal meltdown, they're selling themselves the ridiculous idea that No Deal is actually 'not that big a problem at all', with the impossible and legally-illiterate fantasy that it can be easily reversed with retroactive legislation after it's been done.
So next time you see any Remainer deceitfully accusing Corbyn and the Labour left of "enabling Tory Brexit" or "secretly wanting a No Deal meltdown" (despite all of their votes against it in parliament, and all their condemnations of the Tory No Deal threats), just remind them of Heidi Allen's ludicrous plan to simply allow Tory No Deal Brexit to happen based on the nonsense fantasy that it can be magically reversed at some point in the future with retroactive 'let's pretend it didn't happen' legislation.
Ask them to explain the sense in this absolute nonsense, and why she’s an irreproachable hero to Centrist Remainers despite wanting to allow Tory No Deal, while Corbyn and the Labour left-are hate figures to Centrist Remainers despite repeatedly attempting to actually block Tory No Deal chaos.
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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 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?
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.
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Just imagine the mainstream media reaction if the shadow chancellor John McDonnell or anyone else from Labour had made a claim as ridiculous as there supposedly being no unemployed people in Britain.
But that's exactly what the Tory Chancellor Philip Hammond did on the Andrew Marr Show.
We all remember the festival of hate that was aimed at Diane Abbott after she got her numbers horribly jumbled up during the general election, but at least she never made a claim as ludicrous as there being no unemployment at all.
Anyone who pays the remotest attention to politics must be well aware of the tricks and scams the Tories use to rig the unemployment figures like unemployed people forced to do unpaid "workfare" work being classed as employed, people working just a few hours a week on Zero Hours Contracts but still on benefits being classed as employed, people hit with draconian benefits sanctions not being classed as unemployed, economically inactive people not being classed as unemployed ...
We also know that the increase in the employment rate since 2010 has been matched by the longest sustained decline in UK workers' wages since records began. It's hardly ridiculous to suppose that the Tory policy of ruthlessly driving down workers' wages and working conditions has resulted in in a boom of low-paid, low-skill jobs as growing numbers of employers use exploitative employment practices like Zero Hours Contracts and fake self-employment in the gig economy in order to rinse as much profit as possible out of the UK workforce.
But we know that Hammond's ridiculous gaffe about there being no unemployed people will get nothing like the mainstream media attention Diane Abbott's mind fart got. And we also know that the mainstream media will continue championing the Tories' rigged unemployment figures without providing the caveat that they've only been achieved through horrific anti-welfare policies like sanctions, "workfare" and erecting as many obstacles as possible for people trying to claim unemployment benefits so that people (especially the mentally ill and under-educated) don't claim what they're actually entitled to.
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David Cameron has been using his lucrative US public speaking tour to brazenly reinvent history but the mainstream media (including supposedly left-wing outlets like the Guardian) were too busy cooing over his Trump joke to bother holding him to account over his absurd revisionism.
Cameron made a lame jape about the best thing about having resigned in disgrace after losing his EU referendum gamble was that he no longer has to listen to wiretapped Donald Trump conversations and the mainstream press adored it. They lavished Cameron with praise for his wit, as if he'd thought of the joke himself rather than had it written for him by one of his script writers.
The press were so busy lauding Cameron for his edgy topical joke and helping him rehabilitate his ruined reputation that they totally failed in their duty to hold him to account over the revisionist drivel he was spouting.
Cameron claimed in his speech that the US and the UK have been "the guardians of freedom, of tolerance, of equality and, yes, of justice".
Freedom
As Prime Minister David Cameron was a big supporter of stripping law abiding citizens and civic organisations of their freedoms.
Cameron's government introduced the Gagging Law to stop charities, voluntary groups, community organisations and trade unions from criticising the Tory government.
One of the freedoms David Cameron and his savagely authoritarian Home Secretary Theresa May despised the most was the right to privacy. Cameron's government introduced Internet filters and legalised the unlawful snooping that the secret services had been doing for decades. Shortly after he quit the Internet Snoopers' Charter was passed, meaning that the concept of freedom from state snooping has been essentially abolished and the UK state gained unprecedented snooping powers that would have turned the East German Stasi green with envy.
Here's a genuine David Cameron quote to give you a clear idea of what his true feelings about freedom were.
"For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens 'as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone." [source]
What he was clearly expressing there was a desire to scrap the freedom of ordinary law-abiding citizens to go about their lives without being snooped on and persecuted by the state.
Tolerance
David Cameron's track record on tolerance is a mixed bag. To his credit he fought down the right-wing of his own party and collaborated with Labour, the Lib-Dems and various other opposition parties to deliver gay equality. But on the other hand Cameron and his government were never averse to using extreme divisive rhetoric in order to appeal to the extreme-right demographic.
Take Theresa May's trolling of high migration neighbourhoods with her appalling "Go Home" vans. Take Theresa May's regular use of divisive anti-migrant rhetoric to appeal to the Ukipper demographic. Take Theresa May's spouse visa rules that openly discriminate against women, and against people who live in the less affluent regions of the UK. Take Iain Duncan Smith's sickening dehumanisation campaign against sick and disabled people. Take George Osborne's austerity agenda that loaded the burden of cuts mainly onto the shoulders of women.
Cameron always talked a good game on tolerance, but the divisive language and discriminatory practices of his government clearly proved that Cameron's Tory party had a very different agenda to the inclusive tolerant agenda Cameron so often liked to talk about.
Equality
The United Kingdom is an astoundingly unequal country. Parts of the UK are the richest places in the world, but of the 10 poorest regions in northern Europe, 9 are in the UK.
David Cameron's government made this situation very much worse by handing one tax break after another to the super-rich minority, whilst loading the burden of George Osborne's ideological austerity agenda onto everyone else. The result of which is that the super-rich minority ended up literally doubling their wealth, while ordinary working people suffered the worst collapse in the value of their wages since records began.
Cameron's government were so successful in rigging the economy in favour of the super-rich minority that the UK was the only country in the developed world to see wages falling in value while the economy was actually growing.
If the economy was growing, but the share of the wealth going to working people was in decline, where did all of the extra money go? To the tiny super-rich minority who bankrolled Cameron's Tory party of course.
Justice
If David Cameron's pretensions about being a champion of freedom and equality were laughable, then his claim to have been some kind of guardian of justice as Prime Minister was frankly absurd.
Who could forget that it was David Cameron's government that stripped legal aid to the bone in order to ensure that ever fewer ordinary people have access to adequate legal representation?
Who could forget that David Cameron's government was ruled to be unlawfully discriminating against people with mental health disabilities by forcing them through their discriminatory Work Capacity Assessment regime, and that Cameron's government ignored the ruling and carried on regardless?
Who could forget that David Cameron's government set about privatising vast swathes of the justice system creating loads of glaringly obvious financial conflicts of interest?
Who could forget that David Cameron's government trashed the concept of open justice by introducing Secret Courts where a person can have their fate decided in a courtroom they are not allowed to enter, under charges they are not allowed to know based on evidence they are not allowed to see?
Who could forget that when David Cameron's government were judged to have broken the law by unlawfully forcing thousands of unemployed people onto unpaid "workfare" placements, they stuck two fingers up at the justice system by rewriting the rules and retroactively applied them so that their unlawful rules would have been lawful had they been written that way at the time?
Who could forget that this retroactive rewriting of the law scam was subsequently ruled unlawful in the courts?
Conclusion
David Cameron gambled the entire future of the UK in order to gain a little bit of short-term party political advantage and he lost.
Instead of remaining in politics to try to fix the situation he himself created, he ran off at the first opportunity to embark on a lucrative public speaking tour of the United States in which he spouts absolute drivel about how he was some kind of guardian of the things his government relentlessly attacked.
Instead of holding him to account for this disgraceful behaviour the mainstream media overlook it all because he "did a funny" about Donald Trump.
The media are supposed to hold the powerful to account and expose their lies, not help them to polish up their tarnished reputations and laugh obsequiously at their jokes.
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If the British public vote to quit the EU then there would be a number of unavoidable consequences. There would be the constitutional issues to consider (a second Scottish independence referendum for example), the negotiation of a new settlement between the UK and the EU (do we accept the "Norwegian Option" or do we bail out of the common market completely) and then there's the necessity of negotiating new trade deals with the rest of the World too, because our current trade relations with other economies are founded on the fact that we're members of the single market and the EU.
One of the most important consequences of Brexit would be the need for a comprehensive review and restructuring of pretty much the entire UK legal system. This is because for the last 40 years UK law has evolved in combination with EU law. Anyone who imagines that the job of disentangling such a relationship is going to be a quick and easy one is clearly imagining some kind of utopian post-Brexit fantasy land where the UK immediately becomes a land of milk and honey for everyone, with no instability, no uncertainty, no difficulties, and no hard work to sort out the mess.
Jeremy Corbyn has said that Brexit would cause the UK legal system to be subjected to a very fast review by the Tory government, and that whole swathes of UK law would be affected, including employment law, consumer rights and environmental regulations.
Expert opinion is on Jeremy Corbyn's side. Professor Michael Dougan of Liverpool Law School has stated that this legal review "would be an enormous theoretical undertaking" and that "it would not be done through parliament". He went on to say that there is a strong consensus that the only way that this huge task could be done is "through an enormous delegation of power from parliament to the government", which would mean that the Tory government would be able to set about restructuring pretty much the entire UK legal system to suit their own interests, free from parliamentary scrutiny (so much for voting Brexit to defend democracy eh?)
The Tory track record when it comes to legal issues is an alarmingly poor one. Here are just a few of the things they've done (much of it with assistance from their hapless Lib-Dem sidekicks between 2010 and 2015):
- Introduction of "secret courts" meaning that since 2013, in the UK (not North Korea) it's possible for a defendant to be found guilty in a courtroom that they are not allowed to enter, on charges that they are not allowed to know, based on evidence that they are not allowed to see.
- Appointment of the first Lord Chancellor in three Centuries with no legal qualifications (Chris Grayling) immediately followed by the second unqualified Lord Chancellor (Michael Gove).
This track record of ideological vandalism, incompetence, totalitarianism and utter contempt for the rule of law is utterly appalling, especially since the points detailed above are far from a complete analysis of the damage the Tories have been doing.
In light of this information, who in their right mind would give the green light to this bunch of lawless ideological fanatics to begin restructuring the UK legal system to suit their own interests?
Legal experts agree that a major restructuring of the UK legal system would be inevitable after Brexit. It's absolutely clear that the government of the day would be the ones to undertake this task. It doesn't matter what your opinions on things like immigration, sovereignty or the economy are, you have to accept the fact that a vote for Brexit would be a green light to the Tories to have an ideologically driven rampage through the UK legal system.
Even if you still think that issues like immigration or sovereignty trump concerns over the damage a bunch of fanatically right-wing Tories could do to the UK legal system, you've got to accept that that further empowering the Tories to attack our labour rights, our consumer rights and our environment is one of the inevitable costs of getting what you want.
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It seems a long time ago that Ed Miliband's Labour helped Iain Duncan Smith rush a load of retroactive changes to his unlawful Workfare legislation through parliament as emergency legislation by whipping Labour MPs into abstaining on every vote in the process.
Iain Duncan Smith's plan to retroactively rewrite his own botched legislation came about after the courts had found that the rules he was using to force unemployed people into working for corporations like Poundland for no wages were unlawful because they were neither intelligible nor approved by parliament.
The idea was to get around a court judgement that their own legislation is unlawful simply by rewriting the legislation and then applying it retroactively so that it would have been lawful had it been written in the new way in the past. To most sane people a plan like this seems more like it should have been the plot to an absurd Kafkaesque story than the behaviour of our actual government, but unfortunately it wasn't some menacing and disorientating plot from a Kafka inspired satire, it was what the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition actually did.
Just a few dozen Labour MPs (including Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and Dennis Skinner) defied the Labour Party whip to vote against Iain Duncan Smith's appalling plan to retroactively rewrite his own botched and unlawful forced labour legislation.
Even after three years it's still staggering that Ed Miliband allowed Iain Duncan Smith to write himself a "Get Out Of Jail Free" card instead of nailing him to the wall over his abject incompetence. If the Labour Party had any strategic nous whatever they would have drawn the process out as much as possible in order to drag Iain Duncan Smith over the coals of his own incompetence and unlawful behaviour. Instead they openly colluded with him, presumably because they approved of the tactic of removing the labour rights of the unemployed and forcing them to work for no wages at major multinational corporations so strongly that they preferred to help Iain Duncan Smith to defend the tactic rather than using the situation to their own political advantage.
In April 2016 the Appeal Court upheld a previous High Court ruling that Iain Duncan Smith's retroactive changes to the workfare legislation were incompatible with human rights legislation, and therefore unlawful.
Padraig Hughes of Public Interest Lawyers said "The court of appeal has now confirmed what the high court made clear in 2014 – that the government’s cynical attempt to introduce retrospective legislation, after it had lost its previous case in the court of appeal, is unlawful and a breach of the Human Rights Act ... .It is yet a further example of the reckless approach this government continues to take towards the constitution and the rule of law".
It's not surprising that so many people have forgotten about, or were completely unaware of, this extraordinary display of unlawful behaviour from Iain Duncan Smith's DWP, and Ed Miliband's utterly bizarre collusion in helping him to introduce even more unlawful legislation in order to cover up the first batch of unlawful legislation. The mainstream media barely covered this shocking story the first time around, and subsequent coverage has been minimal to say the least.
The Appeal Court ruling is a truly damning indictment of the utter Tory contempt for the rule of law, however this hugely important story has flown almost completely under the news radar because the bulk of the corporate mainstream press are clearly more interested in doing everything in their power to undermine Jeremy Corbyn's growing popularity, than cover the unlawful behaviour of the actual government.
In my view there are two very important things to note. The first is that the Labour Party is now led by some of the genuinely left-wing Labour MPs who refused to participate in Ed Miliband's ludicrous collusion with Iain Duncan Smith in allowing him to rush through his human rights denying retroactive workfare legislation back in 2013. This means that the current Labour Party would be far more more likely to hold the Tories to account, rather than collude with them like their strategically inept New Labour predecessors did.
The second thing is that this case is a perfect illustration of the real reason that the Tories want to scrap the Human Rights Act and abandon the European Court of Human Rights. The Tories hate the fact that our pesky human rights prevent them from doing whatever the hell they want. They don't want to have to ensure that the legislation they push through parliament is compatible with our human rights. It would clearly be much easier for them if they scrap our human rights so that they can do whatever the hell they like.
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One of the most commonly used Tory propaganda narratives is that there is a big problem with people who don't respect traditional "British values". The Tories love to cast themselves as the protectors of British values, and propose all kinds of draconian measures such as the abolition of free speech, the scrapping of the concept of innocent unless proven guilty and indoctrination schemes to instill a very Tory version of British values in all of our school children.
In this article I'm going to consider the shocking hypocrisy of a political party that claims to support and defend British values but which is actually engaged in an ideological war against long-established British values such as freedom of speech, the presumption of innocence, the right to a fair trial, and the right to be left alone by the state if you're a law abiding citizen.
The right to a fair trial
Not only is the right to a fair trial one of our most cherished British values, it's also one that has proven so popular that it has been adopted by liberal and democratic nations all across the world.
It should be a matter of pride to British people that our nation inspired the world in this way, but our ancient right to a fair trial has been severely eroded by the Tory party, and looks even more threatened by the Tory efforts to scrap the Human Rights Act and withdraw the UK from the ECHR.
One of the most blatant Tory attacks on the ancient British right to a fair trial was when they introduced Secret Courts so that defendants could be tried in a courtroom they are not allowed to enter, on charges they are not allowed to know, based upon evidence they are not allowed to see.
Anyone who thinks that such a crude assault on the concept of open and fair justice is compatible with British values must have a very different interpretation of British values to my own, and to those of anyone who believes that justice needs to be seen to be done fairly, otherwise it's not justice at all.
It's no surprise at all that the Tories want to get rid of our human rights, since their secret courts legislation is so blatantly at odds with Article 6 of the ECHR which states that "everyone is entitled to a fair and public hearing within a reasonable time by an independent and impartial tribunal established by law".
Freedom of expression
Another long-established British value is that people should be free to express their views, as long as those views are not incompatible with the law. Thus one person has the right to interpret British values in one way, while others may disagree very strongly indeed. What unifies the vast majority of versions of what British values are is that people should have the freedom to believe and express their own values, as long as they are not breaking the law by doing so.
The Tories are pushing forward with new measures to revoke this right to free speech. If Theresa May and David Cameron get their way, it will no longer matter whether the expressed opinion is lawful or not (or even if an opinion has been expressed at all) if the government or the security services take exception to the individual, they'll be able to ban them from freely expressing their views.
The Tories have used the age old "bogeyman tactic" to scare people into agreement, but a person would have to be completely ignorant of the concept of function creep to imagine that any such laws would only ever be used against suspected Islamist extremists. Once the state has awarded itself the ability to silence people with no evidence at all of any actual wrongdoing, who would be naive enough to imagine that such draconian restrictions on freedom of speech would never be used against other people too.
Another factor to consider is that once the right to free speech is abolished and these draconian new censorship laws are enforced, how would it even be possible for us to know that they weren't being used to censor law abiding citizens?
It's beyond obvious that the first thing the state would do if they were using these laws to censor people who aren't radical Islamists (political agitators, investigative journalists, environmentalists, people speaking out against high profile paedophile MPs, anti-corruption campaigners, whistleblowers etc) would be to prevent the targets from ever speaking out about the fact they are being censored by censoring them every time they try to complain about it.
Not only are these proposals to scrap the right to free expression at odds with traditional British values, they're also at odds with Article 10 of the ECHR which protects our "freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority"
The presumption of innocence
Another traditional British value that the Tories are ever so keen to scrap is the idea that people should be considered innocent until it is proven beyond reasonable doubt that they are guilty.
Theresa May's draconian new proposals to revoke the right to free expression from people who have broken no law whatever is clearly at odds with the presumption of innocence.
What Theresa May want to replace the presumption of innocence with is a system where agents of the state only need express a "reasonable belief" that the target might do something bad, in order for draconian restrictions on their freedom of speech and their freedom of assembly to be imposed.
If the Tories get their way then agents of the state will no longer have to actually prove that someone has done anything wrong, or even that they are planning to do anything wrong. All they will have to do is claim that they suspect that the person may at some point do something wrong. Essentially the Tory party are legislating against the possibility of thought crime. In order to be a potential target for these censorship proposals the individual won't even have to be guilty of thought crime! - All that it will take is for somebody in power to claim that they suspect that the individual may be guilty of thought crime in order for their freedom of expression to be revoked.
The right to privacy
Yet another traditional value in Britain that is under Tory attack is the idea that law abiding people have the right to privacy.
When the Edward Snowden leaks revealed that the British surveillance state was mass trawling the private communications data of countless millions of innocent people, and doing so without the approval or oversight of parliament, the Tory reaction was to rush through some "emergency legislation" to allow the security services to continue mass trawling our private communications data with complete impunity.
The idea that agents of the state should be able to trawl through our emails, our social media postings, our webcam conversations, our online transactions and all of our other private communications data is not only completely at odds with the traditional British belief that law abiding people have a right to privacy from state snooping, it's also at odds with Article 8 of the ECHR which enshrines a right to "respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence".
Freedom from harassment by the state
There are few British people of any political persuasion who would support the idea that the state should routinely harass law abiding citizens.
In May 2015 David Cameron famously complained that the British state is too tolerant, and declared his intention to make sure the state interferes more in the lives of law abiding citizens. If you read his actual words it's impossible to infer any other meaning:
"For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens 'as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone'." - David Cameron, May 2015
It is interesting to note that this statement is about as clear an attack on an established British value as it is possible to make. Cameron clearly admits that freedom from state harassment is a long established British value, but one that he wants to see abolished and replaced with a system where law abiding citizens won't be left alone by the state.
David Cameron has clearly expressed the idea that the traditional British custom that law abiding people deserve to be left to get on with their own lives is somehow wrong and needs to be scrapped. To express such a thing is appalling enough in itself, but the fact that the person saying it loves to dress himself up as a protector of British values is even more repulsive.
Essentially what David Cameron is saying is that in order to "protect British values" we need to scrap British values.
Conclusion
I believe that stuff like the right to a fair trial, freedom of speech, the presumption of innocence, the right to privacy and freedom from harassment by the state are all long established British values, that are not only believed in by most British people, but also have very long historical precedents, some of them going back as far as the Magna Carta.
When David Cameron and Theresa May deliberately attack and destroy these concepts, they're actually guilty of attacking and destroying the British values they claim to be upholding.
The sad thing is that so many people are so easily fooled that all the Tories need to do is show them a picture of an Islamist extremist, then cast their plans to destroy long-established British values as the only alternative, and tabloid minded people will bleat for their own rights and values to be abolished.
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.
