Politics and Priti Patel's 50% rule

On March 19th 2013 just 315 of our elected parliamentary representatives bothered to vote on the introduction of retroactive legislation, designed to undermine the judgement of the Court of Appeals that Iain Duncan Smith's benefits sanctions regime was unlawfully administered, and to avoid compensating the victims of this unlawful regime.

As these new retrospective rules were rushed through parliament in a matter of hours (with the collusion of the Labour party leadership), only about 60 MPs actually bothered to sit through the debates, with only around half a dozen or so on the government benches and the rest on the opposition benches. When it came to the votes, around 250 Tory and Lib-Dem MPs appeared, as if out of nowhere, to vote in favour of retroactive law, despite having completely ignored the debate.

One of these MPs that ignored the debate but turned up to loyally cast her vote to save Iain Duncan Smith's political career with an absurd retroactive rewriting of his botched rules was Priti Patel. Perhaps the most noteworthy thing this woman has ever said (other than lambasting British workers as lazy and workshy despite the fact we work amongst the longest hours in the EU) was a statement about Trade Union ballots in which she whined that "any ballot in which fewer than half of those eligible to vote do so should be ruled invalid."

Well; despite 250 government MPs turning up to swamp the debate with their votes, only 48% of MPs voted on the Jobseekers (Back to Work) Bill. Priti Patel did not criticise this low turnout.

There are two issues here. If Priti Patel wants new rules to be applied to the trade union ballots of ordinary working people, those same rules should apply to Westminster and the political classes too. If fewer than 50% of MPs vote in a debate, it should be ruled invalid. If fewer than 50% of constituents vote in parliamentary elections, the ballot should be ruled invalid, if fewer than 50% of people vote in PCC elections, the results should be ruled invalid. If fewer than 50% of people vote in local elections, the results should be ruled invalid. If fewer than 50% of people vote in European elections, the results should be ruled invalid.

We can't allow the political classes to impose one set of rules for us, yet maintain a much laxer set of rules for themselves. The problem is of course that the imposition of a 50% rule would paralyse the political system. Under the 50% rule every single ballot in the November 2012 PCC elections would have been ruled invalid. A significant number of bills passed through parliament would fail the 50% standard. Most European and Local government elections would fail this rule. In fact, many of the safe seats in parliamentary elections fail to record 50% turnouts too.

The other issue is the swamping of the debate. Without these 250 odd MPs that didn't even bother to listen to the debate the government would have lost the vote by about 52 votes to 6. I believe that if an MP hasn't even bothered to sit through at least 50% of the debate, they should be barred from voting on the bill. I mean what is the point of even having a debate at all, if hundreds of MPs simply vote the way they've been told without the slightest consideration for the issues raised in the debate?

I'd like to see the 50% rule applied to all political elections and to political debates too. If less than half of the public can be bothered to vote, the winner has no political mandate to assume their position and if fewer than half of MPs can be bothered to actually attend the debate, then the bill has no democratic legitimacy and should be scrapped.

Another Angry Voice is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only source of revenue for Another Angry Voice is the  PayPal  donations box (which can be found in the right hand column, fairly near the top of the page). If you could afford to make a donation to help keep this site going, it would be massively appreciated.

More articles from
ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE   
     
The Jobseekers (Back to Work) Bill
               
 Retroactive laws are fascist laws
      
The Workfare ship is sinking
           
The Tory PCC election farce 

Secret Courts and the very Illiberal Democrats
        
Legal Aid cuts: A Tory commodification of justice

The Tory contempt for working people
      
More Tory attacks on employment rights
                  

Owen Paterson's cyber-swarm

Last week the Tory so-called Environment minister Owen Paterson refused to support a precautionary ban on neonicotinoid pesticides.There is a growing body of evidence that they are harmful to bee populations. Bees are very important because they are pollinators. Many plant species rely entirely upon insect pollination, and a large proportion of the food we eat is pollinated by bees.

Paterson's excuse for trashing the precautionary principle is that the study his department has been doing into the effects of neonicotinoids has not been completed. The reason it was not completed is that the control group got contaminated with neonicotinoids because they are so widely used!

One factor that Paterson failed to mention is that one of the main European producers of neonicotinoid pesticides is the British based company Syngenta, who would stand to lose a lot of business were one of their main products to be banned in the EU.

There is a great deal of public concern over the issue of pesticides and bee populations. A save the bees petition on the Aavaz site has over 2.5 million signatures. As part of their campaign they suggested that people write to Owen Paterson in order to explain their concerns. Subsequently 84,000 people sent him emails.

Owen Paterson's response was frankly astonishing. He decided to smear these emails as a "cyber-attack" and complain that these bee emails prevented him from doing his job.

I'll deal with his complaint that these emails prevented him from doing his job before I get to his abuse of language. Anyone that is incapable of filtering their emails for the word "bee" and then moving the selected emails to a separate folder is clearly not fit to be running a major government department. Even if he is not tech savvy, there should be someone in his constituency office or the department that he heads capable of explaining this simple function to him.

This public display of computer illiteracy detracts terribly from his use of the phrase "cyber-attack" to describe this email campaign. If he's incapable of doing a simple IT task like filtering his emails, he's a functional computer illiterate who clearly has no authority to use IT terminology like "cyber-attack".

For those that don't know the precise definition of "cyber-attack" here it is:

"A cyber-attack is deliberate exploitation of computer systems, technology-dependent enterprises and networks. Cyber-attacks use malicious code to alter computer code, logic or data, resulting in disruptive consequences that can compromise data and lead to cybercrimes, such as information and identity theft."

Tens of thousands of individual people taking their time to express their legitimate concerns to a relevant government official does not, in any way, constitute a cyber-attack. The only way it could remotely be construed as a deliberate "cyber-attack" is if the people that orchestrated the email campaign deliberately attempted to deny service to Paterson's email account by exceeding the size limit. However, the strategy of getting tens of thousands of individuals to send one email each is just about the most inefficient possible way to do this.

The thinking behind Paterson's complaint is obvious. He doesn't want to hear people's legitimate concerns, so he'd like the act of suggesting that someone write to their MP over a specific issue to be redefined as cyber-terrorism. This way, pesky petition sites and independent bloggers (like me) could be criminalised for suggesting that people exercise their democratic right to complain.

Given that all three establishment political parties have now embraced the concept of introducing retroactive laws, when they do bring in a legislation to criminalise "Inciting communication with elected representatives" they might as well backdate it to the beginning of the internet age so that they can shut down all these pesky petition sites and round up all the independent bloggers that have ever used the internet to that their followers exercise their right to write to their MP!

To describe an email campaign by tens of thousands of concerned citizens as a "cyber-attack" is not only a grotesque misrepresentation of what a cyber-attack actually is, it also displays a breathtaking contempt for the concept of open and accountable governance. Not only is Paterson refusing to even consider the concerns of the people who wrote to him, he's actually smearing them as cyber-terrorists.

If you feel that Owen Paterson has been misusing the phrase "cyber-terrorism" to smear people with legitimate concerns, could I suggest that you drop him an email to complain at patersono@parliament.uk

If you haven't already signed the Aavaz "save the bees" petition, you can do that here.

Another Angry Voice is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only source of revenue for Another Angry Voice is the  PayPal  donations box (which can be found in the right hand column, fairly near the top of the page). If you could afford to make a donation to help keep this site going, it would be massively appreciated.

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The Jobseekers (Back to Work) Bill

On March 19 2013 the coalition government managed to push some hastily drawn up "emergency legislation" through parliament which retroactively amended the botched rules they had drawn up to force people onto their mandatory labour schemes.

I've already explained why the introduction of retroactive legislation is totalitarian stuff, which sets dangerous precedents in a previous post (which can be seen here) so I won't go into too much detail about why such retroactive rule changes are immoral. I have also explained why the mandatory unpaid labour schemes this retroactive legislation is designed to salvage are immoral and economically illiterate in a previous post (which can be seen here).

Suffice to say that the Jobseekers (Back to Work) Bill which serves to retroactively change the law in order to protect the government's economically illiterate mandatory unpaid "workfare" schemes, is an awful bit of legislation.

Retrospectively amending the law in order to undermine a court judgement that the actions of the government were unlawful sets an appalling precedent. Whenever the government is found to have been treating citizens unlawfully, this precedent means that they would be able to simply retroactively amend the law to make their actions lawful. I find it difficult to believe that anyone could be incapable of understanding why this is a bad thing.

It is undeniable that this bill would never have been necessary in the first place were it not for Iain Duncan Smith's absurd incompetence. It is amazing that the man is still in his job after pushing through reams of unintelligible rules and the embarrassment of having his cack-handed schemes declared unlawful at the Court of Appeals. Yet, instead of being sacked, or falling on his sword, his Tory colleagues and their Lib-Dem lackeys have decided to protect him with this ridiculous piece of legislation.

The worst aspect to this whole saga is that it has been pulled off with the collusion of the Labour party too. By allowing this bill to be presented as "emergency legislation" the Labour leader Ed Miliband allowed the government to pass this new, hastily cobbled together legislation through parliament in a single day. Then when it came to the voting, the majority of Labour MPs (including the entire front bench) abstained in order to let this disgraceful bill  pass virtually unopposed.

Here's what the Labour shadow minister for employment Stephen Timms (the guy that as minister for digital Britain claimed that "IP address" stands for "Intellectual Property address"!) had to say in the House of Commons during the rush to pass this legislation.

"The way forward proposed by the Bill and the programme motion is deeply unsatisfactory, but it is less bad than the alternatives, and for that reason I shall not urge my hon. Friends to oppose it."

So, because Labour couldn't conceive a better alternative than this "deeply unsatisfactory" motion, they allowed it to pass unchallenged.

It is difficult to establish why they refused to oppose this "deeply unsatisfactory" motion. They've cobbled together some excuses about getting concessions from the government in return for not opposing the bill. However by colluding with the Tory led government in allowing it to glide through parliament virtually unopposed they've let Iain Duncan Smith off the hook big time. Why on earth didn't they seize the opportunity to "nail him to the wall" over his incompetence? Why didn't they let him sweat it out at the Supreme Court, instead of allowing him to write himself a retrospective "get out of jail card"? Why didn't they make the case that undermining the judgement of the courts by retroactively amending the law is an absurd abuse of process?

One can only assume that they refused to do their job as opposition because they agree with the precedent being set. They're thinking that the next time they get into power, they'd like to have Tory and Lib-Dem support when they decide to retroactively amend the law, to magically render their own unlawful actions lawful.

Either that or they are running scared of the baying right-wing press.

There were a few Labour MPs that listened to their conscience and defied the Labour leadership to vote against this disgraceful exercise in retroactive lawmaking, they are listed below (along with members of other parties that voted against). These individuals should be exempted from the criticism that the Labour leadership (and the majority of the party) thoroughly deserve, for having put Iain Duncan Smith's interests above the interests of the thousands of people he unlawfully thrust into destitution.

The only parties to cast all of their votes in opposition to Iain Duncan Smith's retroactive lawmaking were the Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru, the Green party and the Alliance party of Northern Ireland.

David Anderson (LAB)
Nicholas Brown (LAB)
Richard Burden (LAB)
Katy Clark (LAB)
Michael Connarty (LAB)
Jeremy Corbyn (LAB)
David Crausby (LAB)
Ian Davidson (LAB)
Jim Dobbin (LAB)
Bill Esterson (LAB)
Mary Glindon (LAB)
Fabian Hamilton (LAB)
Dai Havard (LAB)
Kelvin Hopkins (LAB)
Ian Lavery (LAB)
Mark Lazarowicz (LAB)
Fiona Mactaggart (LAB)
John McDonnell (LAB)
Jim McGovern (LAB)
Michael Meacher (LAB)
Ian Mearns (LAB)
Austin Mitchell (LAB)
Madeline Moon (LAB)
Grahame Morris (LAB)
Sandra Osborne (LAB)
Teresa Pearce (LAB)
Margaret Ritchie (LAB)
Steve Rotherham (LAB)
Barry Sheerman (LAB)
Jim Sheridan (LAB)
Dennis Skinner (LAB)
Graham Stringer (LAB)
Gerry Sutcliffe (LAB)
Joan Walley (LAB)
David Winnock (LAB)
Mike Wood (LAB)

Gregory Campbell (DUP)
Jeffrey Donaldson (DUP)
Nigel Dodds (DUP)
Mark Durkan (Plaid)
Jonathan Edwards (Plaid)
Stewart Hosie (SNP)
Elfyn Llwyd (Plaid)
Naomi Long (Alliance)
Caroline Lucas (Green)
Angus MacNeil (SNP)
William McCrea (DUP)
Angus Robertson (SNP)
Jim Shannon (DUP)
Mike Weir (SNP)
Eilidh Whiteford (SNP)
Hywel Williams (Plaid)
Pete Wishart (SNP)

Another Angry Voice is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only source of revenue for Another Angry Voice is the  PayPal  donations box (which can be found in the right hand column, fairly near the top of the page). If you could afford to make a donation to help keep this site going, it would be massively appreciated.

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Derivatives and Economic parasitism

Did you know that the untaxed and unregulated global derivatives market is many times larger than the GDP of the entire world?

There are several estimates for the size of this untaxed and unregulated derivatives market. Some estimates range as high as $1.5 quadrillion ($1,500,000,000,000,000) which is around 18 times the size of the entire productive output of the world. The IMF are more conservative with their estimates, but they still conclude that the global derivatives market has remained, on average, over 8 times the size of world GDP since the economic crisis of 2007-08.

To the economic layman it is pretty difficult to envisage how the derivatives market can be so many times bigger than the actual economy. The question that is raised is how all of these derivative trades exist outside the "real economy" of the world.

The answer is not a simple one, but for the sake of brevity I'll simplify it. Let's think of the GDP of the world as all of the actual goods produced and all of the services provided in the world in a year (the "real economy"). The derivatives market is like an untaxed, unregulated betting shop, where financial sector players can put bets on which of these "real economy" trades and transactions will succeed and which will fail.

As part of the financial sector deregulations inspired by the Randian neoliberal brigade, derivatives were exempted from regulation and taxation by the US authorities by the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. This legislation was like removing all regulation from the betting shop, allowing punters to have unlimited credit, allowing the bookies to rig the markets and to provide odds that they have absolutely no possibility of paying out on, then to top it all off, exempting the whole lot from taxation.

Following this deregulation the derivatives market boomed and rapidly grew to many times the size of the "real economy" of the world. In 2001 the derivatives market was around 9 times the size of the entire US economy, by 2008 it was more than 40 times as large.

Derivatives (like Collateralised Debt Obligations and Credit Default Swaps) were at the very epicentre of the global financial sector meltdown, yet since 2007-08 virtually nothing has been done to re-regulate the market, which has continued to grow faster than the real economy of the world.

To put the size of the derivatives market into perspective, if derivatives were included in the GDP of the world, banking activity would make up somewhere between 88%-98% of all the trade in the world. This means that in terms of cash flow, a few banks on Wall Street and in the City of London do many multiples of the economic activity of every factory, power station, hospital, school, army base, retail outlet, mining operation, hotel, farm and public transport operation in the entire world combined.

The idea that a few banks are more financially productive than the rest of world economy is just ludicrous.

Ever since the global financial sector meltdown of 2007-08 it has been abundantly clear to anyone that takes an interest in such things, that the banks have driven themselves into insolvency through the ridiculous scale of their gambling. But instead of letting these institutions die (as neoliberal, free-market capitalism actually dictates) the governments of the world have decided to provide the largest state subsidies in human history to keep them afloat (and set about spreading the Great Neoliberal Lie: that the crisis was caused by excessive spending rather than financial sector speculation). 

The UK handed their financial sector over 90% of UK GDP in bailouts, Ireland, Greece, Portugal and Spain subsumed the vast debts of private banks onto their public debts, the European Central Bank has handed out over €1 trillion in ultra-low interest loans to the European financial sector, the US, UK and Japan have been printing money like mad to flood it into the financial sector, yet the banks steadfastly refuse to lend out any of these unprecedented state subsidies, because they need virtually all of it to cover their mind boggling gambling losses.

The fact that the ordinary citizens of the world are being made to pay the price of keeping these hopelessly insolvent financial sector institutions afloat (through austerity, sequesters, cash grabs, hidden inflation and the devaluation of currencies, pension funds, wages and savings) is a clear example of economic parasitism.

The banking sector is now like a gigantic cuckoo chick, relying on the tiny reed warbler (the real economy) to make enormous sacrifices to continue providing it sustenance. The reed warbler does all of the actual work, whilst the cuckoo chick takes all of the rewards.

The difference of course, is that the reed warbler doesn't recognise that the cuckoo chick it is raising as it's own offspring for the parasite that it is. However, more and more people are realising that the financial sector institutions that caused the economic crisis are now nothing more than financial parasites, feeding off, and weakening the "real economy" of the world in order to keep themselves alive.

 Another Angry Voice is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only source of revenue for Another Angry Voice is the  PayPal  donations box (which can be found in the right hand column, fairly near the top of the page). If you could afford to make a donation to help keep this site going, it would be massively appreciated.

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Retroactive legislation is fascist legislation

Here's a question: If the Court of Appeals declares your mandatory labour schemes for the unemployed unlawful on the basis that the rules you drew up were incomprehensible, what on earth can you do to prevent paying compensation to the thousands of people you unlawfully thrust into destitution?

There are a couple of sensible answers to this question:

A legalistic response: You could take the case to the Supreme Court and try to get the Appeal Court ruling overturned.

An honourable response: You could accept responsibility for having drawn up a bunch of unintelligible and unlawful rules and resign from your job. Your successor could then compensate your victims, whilst you took the blame for your disastrous mismanagement of your brief.

As you probably know, the question isn't a hypothetical one, it's a very real one. The minister is the Tory Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Iain Duncan Smith.

If you are familiar with Iain's incredible levels of contempt for the law, the public, the unemployed, the taxpayer, the disabled, the dead, the concept of labour rights and for coherent and rational debate, you'll know that he has absolutely no intention of making a legalistic or honourable response to his blunders.

Iain actually intends to respond to this situation of his own making, by rushing "emergency legislation" through parliament to retrospectively amend the rules.

Iain's response to being told that his botched mandatory labour schemes are unlawful because the rules were unintilligible, is to simply rewrite them and apply them retrospectively, so that had the rules been written that way at the time, people would have been able to understand them.

This is an absurd abuse of process. The imposition of retrospective law is forbidden under Article 7 of the European Convention on Human Rights (no wonder the Tories want to scrap those rights) and it is absolutely bonkers to believe that retrospectively rewriting the rules alters the judgement of the Court of Appeals, in fact it makes their judgement even stronger, given that people will have been punished for failing to comply with rules that hadn't even been written at the time!

If Iain Duncan Smith's "mandatory unpaid labour or destitution" rules were declared unlawful because they were impossible to understand, how possible was it for people at the time to understand the new "emergency" rules that hadn't even been written yet?

It is obviously impossible to understand something that hasn't even been written, therefore this attempt to undermine the Apeals Court ruling is as flawed as it is contemptuous.

There is a very good reason that the imposition of retrospective laws is banned: If the government can simply reclassify past activities as criminal offences, this gives them an incredibly powerful tool to abuse the citizens they are supposed to be serving.

To give a hypothetical example of how retrospectively applied law is totally unfair; Imagine that the drink driving laws are amended to reduce the permissible blood alcohol content from 80mg of alcohol per 100ml of blood to 50mg (a change that is currently under consultation in Scotland), but that the government use the Iain Duncan Smith precedent (that laws can now be backdated) to apply it for the year 2000. Would it be fair for the police to retrospectively charge any driver that was tested between 2000 and the imposition of the new law and found to have blood alcohol level between 50mg and 80mg? Of course it wouldn't because these drivers were clearly complying with the law as it stood at the time.

The imposition of retrospective law is a fascist concept because it grants the state new powers to criminalise law abiding citizens for engaging in activities that were not criminal offences at the time. Once the concept of retrospective law is normalised, the government then has the ability to target particular groups with retrospective legislation. Let's say the government objects to the activities of a particular trade union, they simply retrospectively amend the law so that one of their previous strikes was unlawful under the new rules and hey presto, they can charge the trade union leaders and strike participants under the new rules, for activities that were completely lawful at the time. Let's say the state objects to a particular social activist organisation, they can simply retrospectively classify the group as a terrorist organisation and jail the members (in secret courts) for terrorism offences, for engaging in was lawful activity at the time.

It doesn't matter whether you believe that the particular group of unemployed people that were thrust into destitution for refusing to comply with Iain Duncan Smith's unlawful mandatory work schemes are deserving of compensation or not. The bigger issue is whether you agree with the principle of retrospectively applied laws and the dangerous precedent that would be set if Iain Duncan Smith and the DWP are allowed to get away with simply rewriting the laws of the land and applying them retrospectively.

Another Angry Voice is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only source of revenue for Another Angry Voice is the  PayPal  donations box (which can be found in the right hand column, fairly near the top of the page). If you could afford to make a donation to help keep this site going, it would be massively appreciated.

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Too big to fail? Too big to jail

In December 2012 the British bank HSBC was fined $1.9 billion by US regulators for laundering hundreds of $billions worth of drug money for Mexican cartels, deliberately bypassing US sanctions on countries like Libya, Iran, Sudan and Burma and conducting business with institutions with links to terrorism. 

This fine came as part of a Deferred Prosecution Agreement, in which financial institutions and their employees are spared criminal prosecution in return for owning up to their criminality. In return they get a fine, which usually amounts to a tiny fraction of their ill gotten gains. Essentially, these fines for criminal behavior have become one of the costs of doing business.

In 2010, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (the US national bank regulator) found that HSBC had severe deficiencies in its anti-money laundering controls, including $60 trillion in transactions. To put this vast figure into perspective, the entire GDP of the World in 2010 was $63 trillion.

This is HSBC's official statement:

"We accept responsibility for our past mistakes. We have said we are profoundly sorry for them"

They describe massive scale criminal behavior (industrial scale laundering of drug money, busting international sanctions and trading with terrorists) as "mistakes" and seem to think that simply apologising is enough.

Imagine for a moment that an individual small accountancy firm had committed any of these acts. That they had laundered money for murderous Mexican drug cartels, deliberately undermined international sanctions or traded with terrorist linked organisations. Do you seriously think the US authorities would let them off with a fine that amounts to a fraction of their ill gotten gains?

The decision to simply let HSBC (and their criminal bankers that arranged all of these illegal trades) get away with it is an appalling demonstration of the dual justice system now in effect, where individuals and small companies "get nailed to the wall" if they get caught trading with terrorist linked organisations or laundering money for murderous drug cartels, yet major banks get away without criminal prosecution for committing such crimes on an unimaginably vast scale.

The stated reason for letting HSBC get away with these enormous crimes?

US and UK authorities decided against prosecuting HSBC in a money-laundering case over "concerns that criminal charges could jeopardize one of the world’s largest banks and ultimately destabilize the global financial system". According to the New York Times regulatory officials stated that "a money-laundering indictment, or a guilty plea over such charges, would essentially be a death sentence for the bank". This is because they would be cut off from major investors such as pension funds and they would lose their charter to operate in the United States.

The fact that they have escaped criminal charges because such charges would probably crash the bank and cause a systemic shock to global financial markets is an absolutely clear demonstration of the "too-big-to -fail" problem. If "too-big-to-fail" has become "too-big-to-jail", then HSBC and the other vast global financial organisations now have a de facto charter to engage in criminal activity, since the regulators have demonstrated that they are unwilling to prosecute them, even for heinous crimes like funding terrorist linked organisations and laundering $billions in drug money for murderous Mexican cartels.

This financial fraud charter from the regulators is a perfect demonstration that crime does pay. As long as the criminal organisation is so large that the lawmakers are afraid to punish them.

Real criminals don't rob banks, they run them.

 Another Angry Voice is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only source of revenue for Another Angry Voice is the  PayPal  donations box (which can be found in the right hand column, fairly near the top of the page). If you could afford to make a donation to help keep this site going, it would be massively appreciated.

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Why I oppose "Bedroom Tax"

I've been repeatedly accused by reactionary right-wing defenders of the "Bedroom Tax" of only complaining about it because I'm a social housing tenant that wants to "live beyond my means". 

The problem with these assertions is that they are the same kind of flaccid assumption laden nonsense that right-wing folk often seem to rely upon in lieu of actually presenting evidence or conducting critical analysis.

For the record I'm not, and have never been a social housing tenant. Therefore these accusations, that I'm only complaining because I want to "live beyond my means", are lazy assumption based rubbish.

The reason I'm complaining is that I recognise that this bonkers scheme is an absolute shambles, which will end up penalising many of the poorest and most vulnerable families in the UK, because there are insufficient smaller houses for them all to move into.

170,000 families in two bedroom homes have been told that they are "under-occupying their property, yet in the year 2011-12 only 85,000 one bedroom social housing properties became available throughout the entire year and most of them were given to new high-priority tenants, rather than to existing social tenants downsizing their property. This means that tens of thousands of social tenants will be unable to downsize, simply because there are insufficient smaller properties available.

This lack of available smaller properties is particularly bad in the North of England and Scotland. In Hull 4,700 families will be hit with "Bedroom Tax", yet there are only 73 available smaller properties. This scheme amounts to little more than the collective punishment of thousands of economically vulnerable families.

Then we come to the question of why is there such a shortage of affordable and social housing. The answer is that the previous Tory administration sold-off swathes of social housing and explicitly banned councils from using the cash to build or properly maintain other social properties. One of the worst aspects of the "right-to-buy" firesale of social property is that more than 30% of these properties have now found their way into the private rental sector, with one of the largest beneficiaries being the son of the guy that dreamt up the social housing sell-off in the first place!

In their 13 years in power Neo-Labour did absolutely nothing to rectify this situation, actually continued the sell-offs and even instituted a policy of bulldozing tens of thousands of affordable properties across the Midlands and the North of England (Pathfinder).

The shortage of social housing has very little to do with people having a single "spare bedroom" in their property and everything to do with 34 years of orthodox neoliberal governments that desperately neglected (and even deliberately vandalised) the social housing and affordable housing sectors.

Right-wingers are always chuntering on about how the state should just leave people to get on with their lives, however, under the "Bedroom Tax", the state has decided that it has the right to interfere in the sleeping arrangements of the family unit (you know, the family unit that is supposed to be "sacred" to the Tory party). They have decided that if a family doesn't make a 15 or 16 year old boy share a bedroom with his 3 year old brother, the family are "guilty" of deliberately "under-occupying their property". Surely, nobody in their right mind thinks that it should be the government's responsibility to force 3 year old kids to share a bedroom with their teenage brother?

One of the other things that exposes the Tory hypocrisy over this, is that pensioners are totally exempt from bedroom tax. The only conceivable reason for this exemption is that pensioners are the biggest Tory voting demographic. There must be tens of thousands of pensioners with large empty family homes, yet the government are more concerned with forcing little kids to share a room with their teenage brother, or making low income families with kids at university either pay a fine of £500+ a year or get rid of their kid's bedroom meaning that these students will have to kip on the sofa when they come back for Christmas and during the summer holiday.

Then there's the fact that two thirds of the families that face being fined for not moving into smaller properties (that don't even exist) have one or more severely disabled members. In many cases the house has been especially adapted for the needs of the disabled tenant. Forcing them out would put a huge financial burden on the council to make the same adaptions to the new property! This isn't the only case of the taxpayer being stung. In many cases families will move out into smaller private rented accommodation, meaning that the taxpayer has to fund much higher Housing Benefits payments, with the cash going to a private profit making landlord, rather than to local councils or not-for-profit social landlords.

The scheme is absolutely bonkers. I could go on with more and more reasons, however I've already listed various other complaints about the unfairness of the "Bedroom Tax" here, so for the sake of brevity I'll draw my conclusion.

The reason I oppose "Bedroom Tax" is not out of my own personal self-interest, it is because "Bedroom Tax" is an incredibly shoddy, malicious and economically illiterate piece of legislation. The Tory party seem intent on collectively punishing many of the poorest and most needy people in society for the fact that there are insufficient smaller properties available. What makes this so malicious is that the reason for this shortage can be traced back directly to the Tory contempt for social housing and their decision to sell huge swathes of it off.

Essentially the Tory party are intent on punishing the poor for the mistakes of Tory party.

I know it is difficult for right-wing folk to grasp this, but in outlining these criticisms I'm not acting out of pure self-interest. As I said before, I am not, and have never been a social housing tenant. The reason I oppose "Bedroom Tax" because I have something that reactionary right-wing thinkers often seem totally unfamiliar with; a thing called a "social conscience".

 Another Angry Voice is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only source of revenue for Another Angry Voice is the  PayPal  donations box (which can be found in the right hand column, fairly near the top of the page). If you could afford to make a donation to help keep this site going, it would be massively appreciated.

More articles from
ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE   
            
Bedroom Tax and Tory hypocrisy
          
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A coalition of LTBs
        
The Atos "disability denial factory"
    
Gaming the Work Programme
      
The Workfare ship is sinking
        

The warped Tory definition of rights

So the Tory Home Secretary Theresa May has announced that she would like to revoke your human rights by scrapping the Human Rights Act and withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights.

The justification narrative for this Tory attack on the human rights of all British people (freedom from torture, freedom from slavery, liberty, the right to a fair trial, freedom from retrospective punishment, the right to privacy, freedom of expression, freedom of association and freedom from discrimination) has already been defined.

We must now expect a barrage of justifications for abandoning human rights, citing a few individual cases like the Islamic extremist Abu Qatada. Here's an article in the Telegraph priming the reactionary right-wing brigade with their argument against Human rights.

The ECHR came into effect in 1953, in the middle of Winston Churchill's second stint as PM. It's a sad indictment of the state of politics in this country when people (including the Tory Home Secretary and Justice Minister) start squealing for 60 year old statutes (that were signed up to by perhaps the most generally lauded Tory PM of all time) to be torn up because of the activities of a loathsome shitbag like Qatada.

It is absolutely clear that this will be their narrative strategy. Their plan is to undermine human rights through association with Islamic extremism, however it is clear that if the words and activities of a tiny minority of Islamic extremists used to destroy our human rights, the extremists have already won. In the words of Benjamin Franklin "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety".

As is almost always the case in modern politics the real reason for the policy is not the stated reason for the policy. A closer look at a few Tory policies may help to explain the true reasoning behind their decision to attack our human rights.

• Workfare: Since "mandatory unpaid labour" is almost a perfect definition of "slavery", one could expect the government's forced labour schemes for the unemployed to come into conflict with Article 4 of the ECHR, which protects us from servitude.

• Retrospective laws: Once again the DWP are at the heart of this conflict with European Human Rights. They're planning to bring in retrospective legislation to avoid compensating all of the people that have been sanctioned for failing to comply with the DWP's unlawful mandatory labour schemes. This is quite obviously illegal under Article 7 of the ECHR which protects us from the imposition of retrospective laws.

• Secret Courts: The Justice and Security Bill that has been pushed through parliament by the Tories and the Illiberal Democrats as an assault on the very concept of fair trials, which are enshrined by Article 6 of the ECHR. A trial in which the defendant cannot even enter the courtroom, can't be represented by their own lawyer, neither they nor their lawyer can know crime they have been charged with, nor the evidence against them seems like the stuff of an Orwellian dystopia or a Kafkaesque nightmare, however these situations will soon be all-to-real thanks to the coalition government. The fact that in Tory secret courts, the defendant won't even be informed of what they have been charged with, is a clear violation of Article 5, which enshrines the "right to be informed in a language one understands of the reasons for the arrest and any charge against them".

• Legal Aid cuts: The massive Tory cuts to legal aid and the local courts system look set to ensure that tens of thousands of poor people, who cannot afford to pay for their own legal representation, will be denied the right to a fair trial. This would also seem to conflict with Article 6 of the ECHR.

• Internet snooping: Another area in which Tory party policy may conflict with the ECHR is Theresa May's Internet Snooper's charter, which would allow the government (and countless agencies working on their behalf) to access your emails and to trawl through your internet history. This kind of Stasi like spying on the general public would be much easier to implement if the Article 8 of the ECHR (the right to privacy) could simply be abolished.

• Medical record fishing: Another Tory policy that would be much easier to implement without the inconvenience of Article 8 of the ECHR is their scheme to allow police, civil servants and local government officials to sift through our supposedly confidential medical records without even having to apply for a warrant first.

One of the most shocking things about this outright contempt for your human rights, is that members of this government clearly believe in their own right to dictate.

Contrast Theresa May's opposition to human rights, with this statement from Tory Employment Minister Mark Hoban:

"The court has backed our right to require people to take part in programmes which will help them get into work"

It is absolutely clear from Hoban's statement that he sees governance in terms of ministerial rights to dictate. In his view, the ministerial right to dictate clearly supersedes the labour rights of the ordinary person (the right to earn the minimum wage, the right to quit if you are being bullied or exploited, the right to paid holidays and paid sick leave...). Now Theresa May is openly fantasising about revoking your human rights (your right to assembly, your right to free expression, your right to a fair trial, your right to life).

It is quite clear from this, that the Tory definition of a "right" is actually something that belongs to the government, not to members of the public. It is the classic Tory principle, "the right to rule".

Let me finish by asking two simple questions.


What kind of government clearly believes in their own rights, but battles to revoke the rights of the public?

The view that governmental rights supersede the rights of the public is a totalitarian stance closely associated with fascism.

If it has a history of fascism, it sounds like fascism and it behaves like fascism, what is it?

The UK Conservative Party

Another Angry Voice is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only source of revenue for Another Angry Voice is the PayPal donations box (which can be found in the right hand column, fairly near the top of the page). If you could afford to make a donation to help keep this site going, it would be massively appreciated.

More articles from
 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE   
   
 The Tory contempt for labour rights

More Tory attacks on labour rights

What is ... a justification narrative?

The Workfare ship is sinking

Mark Hoban's totalitarian tendencies

Secret Courts and the very Illiberal Democrats
  
The "unpatriotic left" fallacy    
 
Lord Freud: risks, corpses and slums 
    
Iain Duncan Smith's callous contempt for the dead