13 things everyone should know about the ECHR

Priti Patel's Rwanda deportation flight was never actually intended to take off.

It was a £500,000 publicity stunt designed to ramp up the culture war against the European Convention on Human Rights, and the court that protects these rights and liberties.

The Tory ploy was to deliberately try to break the law, in order to claim that the nasty Europeans are preventing us from doing what we want to, and agitate for Britain to leave the jurisdiction of the ECHR.

Given that the UK government is intent on whipping up culture war propaganda against it, here are 13 things that people should know about the ECHR:

It's got nothing to do with the EU

The ECHR has absolutely nothing to do with the EU. It's an independent institution established in 1950.

So all these far-right polemicists shouting "leave means leave" over the Rwanda situation are either thick as mince, or being deliberately misleading.

Churchill's finest legacy

Winston Churchill was a true enigma of a man. A right-wing racist who despised Indians and set soldiers on British workers, but a war leader in the fight against Nazism, and a man who promoted the idea of internationally accepted human rights to prevent the horrors of fascism from happening again.

The development of the ECHR was supported by both Churchill and Labour PM Clement Attlee, meaning anyone who wants to rip Britain out of of the ECHR is trashing the legacies of the favourite 20th Century Prime Ministers of both the right and the left!

Protection from fascism

The ECHR was designed to protect European citizens from fascism, and make sure nothing like the horrors of the Second World War could ever happen again. So you've really got to wonder about the true motivations of any government that wants to drag their country out of it.

The life's work of Johnson's own grandad

Boris Johnson's own grandfather James Fawcett was a member of the ECHR from 1962-1984, serving as its President from 1972-1982. He dedicated his life's work to human rights, and wrote books on international law, and the application of the ECHR.

It's not just an indication of the decline of Fawcett's family lineage that his own grandson is the radical-right philistine who is intent on wrecking his life's work, it's indicative of our national decline too.

For all of our many faults, Britain was once a great nation in some ways, stocked with decent, honest, earnest men like Fawcett who worked for the betterment of humanity.

These days we lift up and celebrate the absolute worst among us, like the bone-idle, incompetent, lying, philandering oaf who is intent on wrecking the life's work of his own grandfather, purely because he knows contemptuously undermining human rights and international law plays well to Britain's depraved hard-right capitalist media.

These days it's all about self-interest, not the betterment of others, and it's a crying shame that we've fallen so far as a nation in just a couple of generations.

Red meat for tabloid-addled reactionaries

It's hard to imagine the warped mindset of the kind of tabloid-addled reactionary who desperately wants to see their own human rights ripped up, purely because they're angry that their beloved Tory government couldn't unlawfully deport a few poor refugees, who they've never even met, and know nothing about.

But this kind of rabidly right-wing ultranationalist reactionary is Johnson's base. The Tories knew they couldn't win elections without attracting the millions who used to vote for UKIP and the BNP, so this policy of destroying our human rights is red meat, intended for their consumption.

ECHR protects British rights

We regularly hear about how the ECHR protects immigrants, by preventing the UK government from defying the law to deport them, but it also protects the rights of British citizens too.

It was thanks to the ECHR that the bans on homosexuality were lifted in Scotland and Northern Ireland; employers were prevented from discriminating against their workers on religious grounds; teachers were banned from brutalising children with corporal punishment; the ban on people in Gibraltar voting in general Elections was lifted; and the multiple rulings to protect the British public from police brutality.

A very British institution

The ECHR was largely drafted by British lawyers, and British judges have always been major players in the institution, with three of Britain's eight ECHR judges having served as president of the court (Nicholas Bratza, Humphrey Waldock, A.D. McNair). 

Only France and Italy out of the other 46 member states have even had two presidents of the court, and many nations have never had a single one.

Leaving would be Putinesque

In all of Europe, only Belarus has never signed up to the ECHR. The only countries to have walked out of it are Greece, after they suffered a violent military coup in 1969 (then re-joined 1974), and then Putin's Russia after the invasion of Ukraine.

Do we really want to join the brutal Papadopoulos Junta and Vlad Putin's Russia as the only European regimes to have torn up their own citizens' European rights?

Crucial to the Irish Peace Process

Boris Johnson has already made his contempt for the Irish Peace Process absolutely clear by barefaced lying that his Brexit deal wasn't going to create a border down the Irish Sea, creating a border down the Irish Sea, and then defying international law with his efforts to rip up the Northern Ireland Protocol after having told everyone it was a great deal, and signing us up to abide by it.

Britain can't quit the ECHR without ripping up the Good Friday Agreement, which stipulates that the UK have the ECHR enforceable in Northern Ireland.

This latest attack on the ECHR demonstrates that Johnson's contempt for the Irish Peace Process knows no bounds.

Internationally accepted rights, or a set of Tory allowances?

The Tories want to tear up the ECHR and replace it with a British "Bill of Rights" which will be drawn up by ministers from the billionaire-bankrolled Tory party!

What kind of idiot wants to have their internationally accepted rights lobbed in the bin, so that the radical-right ghouls Johnson has surrounded himself with can decide what rights and liberties they will and won't allow us to keep?

Know your rights

The first 18 Articles of the ECHR are the most fundamental. Most of the rest relate to technical details of how the court functions. Here are the rights that Boris Johnson and the Tories are seeking to rip up:

Why the British press hate it

Johnson is intent on attacking the ECHR because Britain's rabidly right-wing corporate media outlets hate it.

The main reason they hate it is because of Article 8, which guarantees British citizens the right to privacy, and prevents them from engaging in the phone-hacking and private surveillance scandals that led to the Levenson Inquiry.

They're still furious that they can't hack into our phones, private communications, medical records, etc ... to do stuff like leak gossip about celebrities and their families, smear left-wing and socially progressive figures, and release the private information of dead British soldiers.

Why the Tories hate it

The Tories hate the ECHR for a very similar reason to the right-wing capitalist media; it constrains their ability to make life worse for people.

• Whenever they want to deport immigrants (or black British citizens) they detest having to try to do it in a way that complies with the ECHR rules.

• When they defund the justice system and scrap entitlement to Legal Aid, they know that they're denying people the right to a free and fair trial.

• When they implement mandatory unpaid labour schemes for the unemployed, they know they're trampling over people's right not to be subjected to forced labour.

• When they bring in legislation to erase our ancient British right to participate in non-violent protest, they know they're attacking our rights to free expression, assembly, and association.

They hate the ECHR because it stands in the way of them being the vicious, malicious bastards that they really want to be.

Conclusion

I'm fairly certain that few could read all of this and still conclude that they want the Tories to trample all over Churchill's finest legacy by walking out of the ECHR, to join Belarus and Putin's Russia as Europe's only non-signatories.

You'd have to be the worst kind of simpleton to imagine that Johnson's billionaire-bankrolled Tories are better placed to decide what our fundamental rights and liberties should be, than a Europe-wide panel of human rights advocates and legal experts.

The big problem is that the kind of low-information voter this malicious anti-ECHR rabble-rousing is aimed at doesn't have the intellectual rigour to actually learn about the issue they're being programmed to froth about, or the patience/comprehension ability to read a detailed summary, if they were ever to somehow come across one.

it's bad enough that decades of failing education and exposure to radical-right capitalist media has created such an enormous demographic of reactionary low-information voters, but that the government actively panders to them like this is a national disgrace.

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Britain never had a reckoning with the fascists in our midst

In the 1930s the British upper classes were absolutely riddled with fascists and antisemites.

There was Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists, which boasted tens of thousands of members, and loads of high-profile supporters including the Daily Mail proprietor Lord Rothermere (great-grandfather of the current owner), who was a personal friend of Adolf Hitler.

There were fascist-sympathisers throughout the aristocracy and the royal family. We've all seen the pictures of Edward teaching the young future queen Elizabeth to do Nazi salutes in the gardens of Balmoral Castle (despite royalist efforts to censor them).

The Tory party was particularly infested with fascists, with loads of Tory MPs and lords signed up to secretive organisations aimed at promoting fascist and antisemitic ideologies.

The Anglo-German Fellowship was dedicated to fostering stronger relations with Nazi Germany. It boasted dozens of Tory party politicians amongst its membership, as well as Bank of England director Frank Cyril Tiarks (who was also a member of the British Union of Fascists), Bank of England governor Montagu Norman, Admiral Sir Barry Domvile, and Geoffrey Dawson who was editor of The Times.

Tory members of the Anglo-German Fellowship included Peter Agnew, Lawrence Dundas, Ernest Bennett, Robert Bird, Robert Tatton Bower, Douglas Douglas-Hamilton, Robert Vaughan Gower, Thomas "Loel" Guinness, Norman Hulbert, Archibald James, Alfred Knox, John Macnamara, Thomas Moore, Assheton Pownall, Frank Sanderson, Duncan Sandys, Murray Sueter, Charles Taylor, Ronald Tree, Lord Brocket, Lord Galloway, the Earl of Glasgow, Lord Mount Temple, Lord Londonderry, Lord Nuffield, Lord Redesdale, Lord Rennell, and the Duke of Wellington.

The Anglo-German Fellowship was supported by a propaganda operation called The Link, headed up by the traitor Barry Domville.

There was also the Imperial Fascist League which was led by the virulent antisemite Arnold Leese, who continued propagandising in favour of Nazi Germany deep into the Second World War from a series of hideouts.

Then there was the truly despicable Right Club which sought to drive Jewish people out of public life, founded by the Tory MP Archibald Ramsay.

The Right Club attracted a load of high profile establishment figures, including the 5th Duke of Wellington, Lord Redesdale, Lord Lymington, Arnold Leese, A. K. Chesterton, George Henry Drummond, the 2nd Duke of Westminster, Tory MP John Hamilton Mackie, and William Joyce (who went on to become Lord Haw-Haw).

The Right Club finally collapsed in 1940 when they were discovered plotting to undermine the British war effort by stealing secret cables between Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt, with the intention of leaking them.

And let's not forget that the widely-celebrated Tory MP Nancy Astor was one of the leaders of the fascist-sympathising Cliveden Set.

Tories, royals, capitalists, and establishment elitists adored Nazi Germany because the first thing Adolf Hitler did when he came to power was to send all the socialists, communists, anarchists, trade unionists, and other assorted leftists to the concentration camps.

They saw fascism as the perfect means of preserving their own wealth, power and privilege, through the ruthless persecution of the political left.

A small minority of the most egregiously pro-fascist figures like Barry Domville, Arnold Leese, Oswald Mosley, and Archibald Ramsay were interned as national security threats during the Second World War, and Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw) was captured and executed for treason in 1946.

However the vast majority of these establishment fascists were allowed to keep their positions of power and influence in the upper echelons of British society throughout the Second World War, and long into the post-war period.

Loads of these aristocratic fascists were even handed important promotions in the post-war period, and lavished with establishment honours like knighthoods and seats in the unelected House of Lords.

Is anyone really naïve enough to believe that all of these people simply gave up their extreme-right, antisemitic, and rabidly anti-left politics, despite having suffered absolutely no punishment whatever for holding such disgusting beliefs, even after our cities had been pounded to rubble by the people they'd been championing?

Of course they didn't. They just learned to hide their despicable extreme-right political views more carefully.

This abject post-war failure to stamp fascists out of public life is one of the big reasons why there's still a disturbing and powerful seam of fascist ideology within Britain's grotesque establishment class.

You look at the racism of the British tabloid press and their constant scapegoating of immigrants; the revocation of British rights from Commonwealth citizens in the 1970s; Enoch Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech; the anti-gay hysteria of the 1980s; the decades-long campaign of blacklisting of left-leaning journalists from the BBC; the rampant racism within institutions of state like the Metropolitan Police; the casual disregard for the millions of victims of Britain's imperialist war-mongering; the systematic demonisation of all left-wing political figures; the extreme-right ultranationalism that drove Brexit over the winning line; the fetishisation of nationalist symbolism and the military; the idolisation of disgustingly antisemitic Nazi-sympathisers like Nancy Astor; the massive blacklists of trade union activists across numerous industrial sectors; the ongoing systematic persecution of disabled people; Theresa May's unlawfully racist "Hostile Environment" and the Windrush Scandal; the constant right-wing agitation for the destruction of our human rights; Boris Johnson's depraved "let the bodies pile high" attitude to the plight of vulnerable people during the pandemic; and Priti Patel's deportation of refugees to Rwanda ...

The reason the British establishment class is so rotten is that we never had a reckoning with the people who wanted Britain to emulate Nazi Germany.

Instead we let them keep their positions of power and influence, and quietly seep their disgusting fascist ideology into the fabric of British society.

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Justin Welby's 'forgive Andrew' comments look even worse in light of his sordid past

The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby has made some extraordinary statements about Prince Andrew's sexual abuse case, claiming that Andrew is "seeking to make amends" and framing the rest of us as being at fault, because we apparently need to “learn to be a more open and forgiving society”!

In reality, one of the most important aspects of "making amends" is admitting what you did wrong, which Andrew has steadfastly refused to do by denying he ever even met his accuser (despite paying her £millions to drop her case against him, and despite that notorious photo at Ghislaine Maxwell's house).

Andrew hasn't even vaguely sought to "make amends". He's just used his family's immense wealth to buy his way out of trouble, and now he's hoping to ride the scandal out and return to public life as if nothing has happened.

And the head of the Church of England is publicly siding with him in this ambition, and making out that it's the rest of us who have the real problems if we object to it!

This is far from the first example of Welby's scandalous behaviour. 

Few could forget the way he tore up the political neutrality of the Church of England during the 2019 general election campaign, by vitriolically attack Jeremy Corbyn, in order to pressure people into voting for his fellow Old Etonian Boris Johnson.

It was illustrative of how corrupted the Church of England has become to see the head of the  organisation wilfully rip up the institution's longstanding political neutrality to endorse a bigoted, lying, greed-worshipping philanderer for Prime Minister, because you could barely imagine a more unchristian character than Johnson could you?

This call to forgive Andrew isn't even the first time Welby has wheeled out this 'importance of forgiveness' narrative to defend his establishment chums either.

Just last year Welby used the same narrative to obfuscate the massive Tory coronavirus corruption scandal, when they cynically used the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to tear up the anti-corruption procurement rules, and then fill their own pockets via secretive lobbying and dodgy untendered multi-million PPE contracts.

Then there's the fact that Welby is guilty of turning a blind eye to child sex abuse within the Church of England during his time as dean of Liverpool Cathedral.

When Welby was informed about child sex abuse allegations against Canon John Roberts in 2011, he didn't just decide not to inform the police or initiate internal disciplinary action against him, he actively sided with Roberts and banned his victim from the cathedral!

What makes it so much worse is that Welby knew at the time that Roberts had a 1989 conviction for child sex offences, and that he'd been allowed to continue working in the church. Despite knowing that Roberts had a history of abusing children, Welby chose to take his side, and take action against his accuser.

When Roberts was finally convicted of the abuse that Welby ignored, he issued a statement saying how much he regretted siding with the sex offender against his victim, but Welby's public statements in support of Andrew over his child sex abuse allegations just go to prove the absolute insincerity of the man.

And let's not forget Welby's personal involvement in sadistic abuse camps in the 1970s, that were set up to indoctrinate young Christians into a radically right-wing version of Christianity.

The church knew about the violent beatings at these Iwerne "bash camps" in the early 1980s and exiled the main perpetrator to Zimbabwe in 1982, but they kept the whole thing secret, allowing Iwerne members like Welby to rise up the ranks of the Church of England.

It's remarkable that the media have just left Welby alone on his personal involvement in this sadistic indoctrination cult, but that's just the way things work in Britain.

Establishment elitists benefit from a protective culture of impunity, which allows them to get away with all kinds of corruption and depravity that ordinary folk would be monstered for.

And whenever one of them appears to be in trouble, the rest close ranks to protect them.

Welby defending Andrew like this is just another example of one establishment sadist demanding impunity for another.

And the worst thing is that the Church of England is apparently happy to have such a sordid individual repeatedly portray their institution as a bunch of savagely right-wing child sex abuse apologists.

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The Mail on Sunday's glaring front page lie

Boris Johnson's latest ruse to distract attention away from the corruption, incompetence, and degeneracy of his regime is to stoke up a load of culture war bullshit over imperial weights and measures and crown symbols on pint glasses.

Appealing to the nostalgia of a bunch of tabloid-addled geriatrics is a simplistic distraction tactic, but it's one that Johnson and the Tories have played before with blue passports, and the right-wing propaganda rags are once again enthusiastically helping him out with this trivial nonsense.

This time it's got so bad that the front page of one of Britain's most widely read newspapers is blaring out the absolute lie that the EU banned crown symbols on pint glasses.

What the EU actually did, if you're interested in the actual facts, was to pass directive 2004/22/EC to introduce the CE mark on pint glasses in order to protect European citizens from undersized measures.

There was never anything in the CE rules to say the crown symbol had to go. In fact the EU commissioner Günter Verheugen explicitly stated that the crown symbol could be kept "as long as it is done in a way that is not confused with the CE marking".

Not only did the EU not ban the crown symbol, they explained that Britain could keep using it if they wanted to. But the UK government decided that they couldn't be bothered pointlessly duplicating the certification process, and scrapped it from 2007 onwards.

If the Tory party really cared so much about crown symbols on pint glasses they could have brought them back at any time between coming to power in 2010 and the present, because they were never banned by the EU.

So why is the Mail on Sunday pushing this brazen front page lie that the EU forced Britain to remove the crown symbol from our pint glasses, and that plucky Bodger Johnson is bravely bringing it back?

Daily Mail propaganda hacks know perfectly well that aside from corporations and the mega-rich, who vote Tory out of self-interest, the Tory party's core demographics are the far-right ultranationalists they nicked off UKIP and the BNP, and other low-information voters.

Tory propaganda hacks love to appeal to the nostalgia, nationalism, and anti-European xenophobia of their readers by portraying trivial and archaic stuff like blue passports, crown symbols on pint glasses, and ludicrously over-complicated imperial weights and measures as quintessentially British things that have been banished by the evil EU.

It doesn't matter to Daily Mail readers that the UK could actually have kept blue passports for the entire time it was in the EU.

It doesn't matter to them the EU never forced UK retailers to stop using imperial weights and measures if they wanted to.

And they literally don't care that the EU never actually banned anyone from putting crown symbols on pint glasses.

Tell them that the European Union forced Britain to get rid of these beloved things, and low-information voters quiver with rage.

Tell them that brave Bodger Johnson freed Britain from the EU tyranny in order to bring this stuff back, and they're supposed to jiggle with delight.

We've entered an age in which people are actively encouraged to ignore the facts, and evidence, and experts, to believe whatever the hell they want.

And it's got to the point now that the newspapers feel emboldened to tell outright lies on their front pages, in order to help Johnson push this absurdly vapid culture war bullshit.

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Do the royals really make us richer?

At times like this, the crawling sycophants always appear in droves to misleadingly insist that the royal family constitute a net benefit to the UK economy.

The absurd creeps making these claims are often so economically illiterate, that they've even been known to claim the entire £19 billion (declared) net worth of the royal family as an annual benefit to Britain!

Putting aside the ludicrous claims that the royal family contribute their entire net wealth to the UK economy every single year, the usual tactic of these subservient grovelers is to place the annual profit generated by the Royal Collection Trust, and the revenue of the Crown Estates in the positive column, without any effort whatever to properly explain what these things actually are, or to add any of the costs of the royal family into the negative column.

Tourism

The most common claim from these fawning royal boot-lickers is that the royal family generates huge amounts of cash in tourism, usually citing the annual profits from the Royal Collection Trust, which are mainly made through tickets to visit royal properties, and gift shop sales.

In 2019/20 they made £49.9 million in profit, but this figure has to be offset by the fact that most of these royal residences would be making far higher profits without a bunch of idle scroungers occupying the properties and dictating opening times.

The former royal palace of Versailles is one of the most profitable tourist attraction in France generating 65 million euros in ticket sales alone in 2019, yet the combined income of all of the royal properties in the UK combined amounted to only £71 million!

Versailles obviously wouldn't be generating anything like as much cash if it was barely open to the public because it was still being occupied by a bunch of inherited wealth squatters, would it?

Imagine how much Buckingham Palace or Windsor Castle would generate if they were fully open to the public most days of the year, rather than used almost exclusively for private purposes.

Imagine how much these properties might generate as ultra-luxurious hotels, where obscenely wealthy guests could pay tens of thousands to dress up in royal garb and pretend to be king or queen of England for the night.

In reality the £50 odd million royalists endlessly claim as a benefit to Britain actually represents a huge loss on what could be being made if the royal family was abolished and the properties were efficiently managed to actually maximise revenues.

The Crown Estates

The claims about tourism are misleading enough, but royal brown-nosers adding Crown Estates revenue into the positive column constitutes downright deception.

The Crown Estates include a 384,000 acre landholding, and the Duchy of Cornwall (another separate estate which has been run since 1377 for the benefit of the heir to the throne) which consists of another 133,000 acres.

Added together, over half a million acres makes the Crown Estates the third biggest land holding in the entire country, after the Ministry of Defence and the Forestry Commission, yet somehow it only brings in £269.3 million in net profit (2021).

If you were some kind of simpleton, you'd add this £250m+ into the positive column for the royal family, but this would simply illustrate that you don't know what the Crown Estates actually are, or how they operate.

In the 18th Century the debt-laden royal family handed over the royal property portfolio to parliament in return for an annual subsidy paid out of public funds, which is loosely based on Crown Estates revenues. In 2020-21 this subsidy amounted to a whopping £86.3m.

Without this whopping Sovereign Grant being taken out of Crown Estates revenues to fund the lifestyles of these inherited wealth layabouts, the public finances would be almost a hundred million quid better off per year!

It's absurd to argue that the wealth generated by the Crown Estates constitutes a net positive, while allowing the royals to siphon off a massive chunk for themselves, and without considering the potential that this vast land-holding could be put to more efficient use without their involvement.

Just like with potential tourist revenues, the continued existence of the royal family actually cause a drain on Crown Estates revenues.

The hidden costs

Aside from the royal sycophants' tactic of brazenly misusing tourist and crown property revenues to make an misleadingly-positive case in favour of the royal family, these grovelling creeps also love to omit the hidden costs from the negative column too.

Boot-lickers love to forget that the fortunes of the royal family are not subject to Inheritance Tax.

If we accept the £19 billion net worth figure as legitimate, they'd owe £7.6 billion when Elizabeth II dies, which adds up to an astonishing £109 million for every single year of her reign so far!

If anyone was interested in doing a fair cost-benefit analysis on the royal family, they'd surely have to add in the £100m+ annual cost of their absurd Inheritance Tax exemption, wouldn't they?

Then there are the secretive royal powers to interfere in parliamentary legislation for their own financial benefit. The UK government still vehemently refuses to reveal which laws have been tampered with by the royal family, meaning it's extremely difficult to estimate what these secretive powers have ended up costing the UK economy.

It's been especially difficult to estimate the economic damage since the Tory government decided to exempt the royal finances from Freedom of Information requests back in 2011, However it's still easy to see how the royals could use this secret veto on democratic legislation to enrich themselves at the expense of the wider UK economy.

Beyond economic considerations

beyond the money, there are other costs to be considered too:

The United Kingdom one of the most unequal countries in the developed world with unacceptably high rates of poverty and destitution, and incredibly low levels of social mobility.

The royal family exist as the figureheads of this unequal and iniquitous system, which is built on valuing inherited wealth and establishment connections ahead of qualities like hard work, integrity, ingenuity, and intelligence.

A bunch of idle malingerers occupying the very top positions in the social order, based on nothing more than hereditary privilege, provides compelling evidence that the UK is nothing like a meritocracy.

Some people are so lacking in self-respect that they actually like to think of themselves as lowly serfs in comparison to their inherited-wealth lords and masters, but the existence of this squalid mob at the top of the pile is an absolute affront to those of us who consider no human as being more inherently valuable than any other, purely by virtue of birth.

Then there's the national embarrassment of a family that insists on bailing out an absolute creep like Andrew, to the tune of £millions, in order to buy his way out of facing up to child sex allegations in court.

What does it tell the rest of the world about the British people that we allow this disgusting creep to continue parading around in public, and representing our nation on the world stage?

What does it tell child sex abuse survivors in Britain, and across the rest of the world, that this vile individual is being allowed to get away with what he's accused of, purely because he was born into a family of born-to-luxury grifters?

Conclusion

Tourist revenues would obviously be higher if the royal properties were fully opened to the public, rather than housing an idle bunch of inherited wealth squatters

The Crown Estates could almost certainly be run more efficiently without the involvement of Elizabeth's squalid mob, and definitely without them siphoning the best part of a hundred million quid out of the public finances each year to fund their lavish lifestyles.

Even if we accept the £19 billion net wealth figure is valid, and not minimised through the hiding of overseas assets, that still adds up to a whopping £7.6 billion in Inheritance Tax these idle parasites are going to avoid through their unjustifiable tax exemption when Elizabeth II dies.

The royal powers to interfere in democratic legislation are so secretive that it's impossible to even estimate how many £billions worth of damage they've done to the wider UK economy by rewriting legislation for their own benefit, but even with such a shroud of secrecy protecting the actual figures, it's clearly an affront to democracy that these powers exist at all.

And then there's the social damage of maintaining such a grotesque social hierarchy, especially when one of the most high-profile figures at the top of it is a sweatless-creep like Andrew.

In light of all of this, the only way to maintain the fiction that the royal family constitutes any kind of benefit to the UK, is through an absurdly biased, and downright misleading interpretation of the actual facts.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

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Why is Starmer so intent on reanimating the corpse of late-stage Blairism?

Keir Starmer’s inner circle is heavily dominated by Blairite loyalists. That’s a pretty indisputable assertion right?

Starmer’s Blair-hagiography of a Conference Speech made it absolutely clear that he’s worshipping at the altar of Blairism (to anyone who had the misfortune of actually listening to it at least).

And to match his words with actions, it’s also crystal clear from his strategy of removing and demoting the soft-left, which has followed his purge of all the genuine socialists and social liberals from his so called “unity cabinet” (via his depraved loyalty tests of whipping Labour MPs to abstain on vile Tory stuff like rape cops and war crime impunity, and booting them out of his cabinet if they refused).

One of the most interesting aspects of this Blairite involvement in Starmer’s vapid form of managerialist posture politics is the way they fail to even recognise the way Starmer has been imitating the failing late-stage Blairism that ended up driving millions of traditional Labour voters away, rather than the exciting early Blairism that promised to do away with a shambolic and sleaze ridden Tory government, that should surely have been removed from power at least half a decade previously.

In order to make the case that they’re imitating the wrong kind of Blairism, it’s necessary to admit that Blair and his government actually got some things right, which I’ve always been willing to do.

The increased investment in public services that began in 1997 was a damned-sight better than the privatisation-obsessed Tory shambles that preceded it, or the economically ruinous austerity extremism that succeeded it.

Other positives included The Good Friday Agreement and improved economic freedom for Scotland and Wales. But it’s the economic investment in infrastructure and services and the living standards increases that are most relevant here. We don’t need to talk about their lamentable policy failings here, because everyone who has even read this far should be well aware of where Blairism went badly wrong.

Blair did some things right to win power and then delivered some good policies in the early years in government ,and the parallels with now are pretty damned obvious. Yet for some absurd reason Starmer and his inner circle are intent on bringing back the hectoring and unpopular late-stage Blairism that drove people away instead.

In 1997 Blair absolutely trounced Major’s Tories by giving people a bit of hope, then he cemented his position in power by being seen to deliver: Rising wages, economic growth, resuscitating the UK’s vandalised social safety net, education, and NHS funding.

So if Starmer and the people who surround him idealise Blair so much, and have so much nostalgia for the Blair years, why aren’t they following Blair’s recipe for electoral success, rather than desperately trying to reanimate the risible and unpopular politics that Labour slumped into after they’d been in power for ages, run out of ideas, and complacently imagined themselves invincible after winning a third straight election, even after creating a disaster like the invasion of Iraq?

Why are they like this?

The answer seems to be that most of the architects and big players in the early Blair years are past it, retired, or deceased, leaving a pathetic residue of obsequious yes people, who were parachuted into positions of power and influence by Blair’s inner circle, without ever having learned where the power actually comes from.

The power comes from the people.

Even in a country like the UK that suffers a hopelessly rigged, archaic, unrepresentative, and decaying democratic institution like Westminster, you have to offer people what they want, rather than overtly mocking and ridiculing their desires for policies that would actually make life just a bit better and fairer for ordinary people.

But the Labour right Blair-loyalists who control the party now have no idea how to offer this, because they were raised in an environment in which it was their job to bend public will to fit the objectives of the Labour government, and to castigate anyone who argued that they should actually be doing things better.

How many of the big figures from Blair’s 1997 triumph are still kicking around? Blair retired to his riches a decade and a half ago. Brown only pops up occasionally. Prescott’s long-gone. Darling, Milburn, Straw, Hoon, and Blunkett are dinosaurs. Beckett and Harman are among the last in still serving in the Commons, and they’re both retiring next time around. Robin Cook, Frank Dobson, Tessa Jowell, Mo Mowlam, and Donald Dewar are all dead. And long-standing Labour Chief Whip Nick Brown has recently been kicked to the sidelines by Starmer.

What’s left of Blairism now is a profoundly unpleasant residue of arrogant and complacent career politicians who mainly got their positions through privilege and patronage, without ever having put in the the hard work of creating genuine public appeal.

Between 2015 and 2019 these second generation Blairites saw Corbyn trying to offer hope, But they clearly thought that he was ‘doing politics wrong’ by trying to appeal to the public, especially his efforts to woo young voters and new demographics who had rarely or never voted before.

As far as they were concerned he should have been offering uninspiring neoliberal gruel,  performing parlour tricks for the media, rehashing the arrogant “this is all you’re getting” stance they cut their political teeth on, and bitterly chastising any objectors for the impertinence of suggesting politicians could and should be doing better.

They were so convinced that Corbyn was wrong, that once they took control of the Labour Party again, they even made it an immediate party priority to  kill off public hopes and aspirations by systematically salting Corbyn’s allotment of policies, and deliberately driving away the hundreds of thousands of politically engaged and active supporters he’d attracted to the cause.

Rather than picking the best and most popular of Corbyn’s policy crop for their own use (investment economics, public ownership of essential infrastructure and services, workers’ rights, higher wages, better education, mass party membership rather than reliance on mega-rich donors ...) and discarding anything they really disliked, they decided to salt the lot, and revert to the only kind of politics they’re familiar with:

Telling people what to think, playing parlour tricks for the media, and chastising the public for daring to want any better from them.

So here’s the challenge for any Blairites who have managed to read this far without suffering fits of rage at the “thoughtcrime” of believing that Labour actually needs to be doing miles better at the moment:

Can you offer a better explanation than mine for why Starmer and his supporters have failed to adopt the positive, vibrant, hope-inspiring and ultimately winning version of Blairism, in favour of trying to reanimate the rotting corpse of late-stage Blairism that the electorate had already had more than enough of 12 years ago?

And more importantly, do you think it’s even possible to make them change course now, after watching them try to flog the same rotting corpse into action for two interminable years?

I mean these are people who steadfastly refused to learn or utilise the power-winning tactics of their own political figurehead before they resumed control over the Labour Party, so what would it actually take to make such a bunch of nitwits suddenly and dramatically improve their game now, after two years of this mind-numbing inertia?

Essays and video clips from from the likes of Another Angry Voice, Novara Media, and Owen Jones certainly aren’t going to wake them up to what they’re doing wrong.

So unless you’re going to sit there and actually try to convince people, including yourself, that these hopelessly inept people aren’t asleep at the wheel, what is it that you need to do to wake them up?

And I say “you do” because they’re only ever going to listen to it from their supporters, if they listen to it from anyone at all. Never from anyone like me.

Do you guys want to wake the sleeping driver? Or do you want to just sit tight, pretend they're doing an excellent job, and hope that everything’s somehow going to work out fine through pure luck?

It’s clearly up to you lot if you want to save your own project from itself, isn’t it?

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

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What the Will Smith slap tells us about the war in Ukraine

Everyone has been talking about Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars, and before that loads of people have been talking about the Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine. 

In this article I'm going to explain what the Will Smith slap tells us about the war in Ukraine:

The Will Smith slap tells us absolutely nothing about the war in Ukraine.

It's got bollocks all to do with it, and this headline is obviously an April Fool's prank from a commentator you'd hopefully expect not to conflate two completely unrelated things for clicks (on any normal days of the year).

It's especially insulting to conflate completely unrelated things when one is a bit of Hollywood pantomime between two millionaire mates, and the other is a massive humanitarian tragedy, resulting in thousands of deaths, and millions of refugees.

Unfortunately there are people out there who are so desperate for clicks and attention that they'll do it in earnest.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

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