Brave new justice

I woke suddenly at about four in the morning to the terrifying sound of breaking glass and splintering wood. For a moment I hesitated, afraid to leave the comfort of my bed and confront whatever horror was happening downstairs. But then I thought of my children, threw off my covers and jumped to action, grabbing my trousers off the floor as I ran out of the bedroom door. Before I could cross the landing to defend my children's bedroom door, I froze, confronted as I was with the spectacle of a masked man on the stairs aiming an automatic weapon at my chest. Behind him were countless more armed and masked men, dressed in militaristic style, clearly some kind of attack squad, but without any identifiable features to mark them out as either police or army.

"Drop your weapons" shouted the masked man. For a moment I hesitated, confused, but then I realised that he could only be talking about the pair of jeans in my left hand. I dropped them to the floor and slowly raised my hands. At this moment my youngest daughter emerged from the bedroom, to see me, her father, naked but for a pair of boxer shorts, and countless masked men on the stairs pointing guns at him. I suddenly realised that several of the masked men were now pointing their weapons at my four year old daughter. "point the guns at me right now" I shouted, but the intruders seemed positively disinclined to follow orders from a half naked civilian and continued "covering the space" occupied by my now tearful daughter.

"Is there anybody else in the house" the first intruder asked as he approached, his weapon lowered and something else in his hands. "Yes" I replied, "my other daughter is in that bedroom too". Even in the relative darkness of the pre-dawn light it became clear what he had in his hands, broad white plastic cable ties. The kind I'd seen on the television used as restraints on countless "insurgents" during the Iranian occupation. As he restrained my arms behind my back, the others continued waving their guns around. "Call out your other daughter now" he said before zipping the cable tie tight around my wrists. Somehow I found within myself a calm but loud voice to call "Katie, come out of your bedroom please".

Katie emerged from the bedroom and stood beside her sister as I heard the unmistakable sound of tape being unpeeled from the roll. I knew the tape was for my mouth, so I told my daughters that I love them and instructed Katie to look after her little sister Sarah until Mummy or Granny comes to get them. The intruders didn't even wait until I'd finished speaking before applying the tape to my mouth. Next they wrapped my still near-naked body in a long black sheet of rough fabric, like a cloak and the last thing I saw before a hood was roughly dragged over my head was the sight of my clearly traumatised daughters weeping.

I was then shoved and cajoled down the stairs, out of the front door and into some kind of vehicle, all the while hooded like a terrorist. My cable-tied wrists were attached to a bar near the floor of the vehicle and I heard the sound of a cage door being closed and locked shut. When the vehicle started, I recognised the distinctive sound of a diesel engine. Absurdly, under the circumstances, I found myself wondering what kind of vehicle I was in. Was it a Transit van? Some other make of van? Or was it some kind of military vehicle? I never found out because I remained bound and hooded until long after I'd been taken into the interrogation centre. Aside from wondering at the make of the vehicle and trying desperately to figure out where I was being taken, with only the cornering of the vehicle as my clues, the only other thing I remember was a growing sense of nausea at being driven around with no visual stimulus at all. I worried about what would happen to me if I vomited with this tape over my mouth and, as far as I could tell, nobody else in the back of the vehicle to even witness it. I was certain that I would drown in my own vomit if I allowed myself to be sick, so I fought the growing urge to chunder as if my life depended upon it.

It was impossible to judge how long the journey took, or where I'd been taken. But I could tell from the acoustics, that before the vehicle had stopped it had been driven into a large building, perhaps an underground carpark. The cage door was opened, my wrists were unshackled from the restraining bar and I was roughly dragged from the vehicle, subjected to numerous kicks and shoves that I had no way of anticipating due to the hood over my head. Eventually I was shoved roughly into a small cell. I stumbled and fell, bashing my face against what I later found out to be the only item of furniture, a low cot. As I lay on the floor, my hands still tied behind my back and my nose bleeding heavily inside the hood I heard laughing. I lay silent and as still as possible in the hope that they might remove the hood to check that I was still alive, but the bubbling, gurgling sound of my breathing through the blood in my nose gave the game away and I was left as I was.

It could have been a full day before they came back for me or it could have been much less. I knew that sensory deprivation causes extreme variations in temporal perception. It must have been quite a long time though, because the blood in my nose and on my face and in my hair was caked dry.

I was dragged along a number of corridors and up some stairs to what I anticipated to be an interrogation cell. When the hood was removed and the tape painfully peeled away from my mouth I must have presented a disgusting mess, caked in dried blood as I was. The room was very dimly lit and I could barely see my interrogator. He told me that I'd been arrested under the 2013 Justice and Security Act and began questioning me about my views about the government, about Iran and specifically the Iranian conflict.

I asked repeatedly to see a lawyer, but I was assured that it would do me no good. Eventually I was taken back to my cell, having answered none of their questions. I was left with a bucket of icy cold water and a dirty cloth, presumably to clean the dried blood off my face, but with my hands still cable-tied behind my back, such a task was absolutely impossible. After wetting my face by dipping it in the bucket, I climbed onto the bunk and slept.

With no window in my cell I lost track of time to such an extent that I had no idea whether it was day or night. I was dragged out for interrogation again, before which I had my hands cut free and was allowed to use the toilet. Having spent countless hours trying to avoid the further indignity of pissing and soiling myself, this toilet stop was a blessed relief. I spent a few minutes at the sink washing the dried blood from my face, under supervision from a burly, blonde haired, middle aged man, the kind of man that would have looked more at home in a black jacket working as a bouncer outside some seedy 1990s nightclub, instead of suited up and supervising prisoners in the toilet of this detention centre.

At my next interrogation there were two men, one of whom never spoke. I guessed that he was probably an American. I could only see their silhouettes but there was something about his manner that made me think of the US military. The other one spoke with a posh accent in a clipped militaristic style and grew increasingly exasperated at my refusal to answer questions until I could speak to a lawyer. He told me that by refusing to co-operate I was harming my defence and that a lawyer would do me no good anyway.

I was returned to my cell and left with food. My stomach told me that I hadn't eaten for days, so I savoured the meal of tepid beans on toast and a stale iced bun as if it were the most succulent meal of my entire life.

Before my next interrogation I was allowed to consult a man who claimed to be a lawyer. After answering my questions about my family to tell me that my daughters were safe with my parents but that my ex-wife was also being held under the same legislation, he told me in no uncertain terms that there was nothing else he could do for me. Under the conditions of the 2013 Justice and Security Act neither he nor I would be allowed to know what I had been charged with or any of the evidence against me. We wouldn't be allowed to present a defence, enter the courtroom or even hear the sentencing.

When I told him that the focus of the questions had been about Iran and the Iranian occupation he seemed intrigued. "Have you ever been to, or had anything to do with Iran?" he asked. I wracked my brain but couldn't think of anything, apart from the fact that I'd possibly mentioned the country in my work as an online journalist several years ago. He made me list all of the websites I'd ever written for.  When I mentioned that I'd written articles for the Press TV blog he almost jumped out of his chair with excitement. "I think I know what this is all about" he said. "You'll be tried in secret court for terrorism offences ... there's nothing we can do about it now... In fact, the trial may already have happened for all I know ... I mean they'll have all the evidence they need to convict". After days of trying to remain calm, his gleeful response to figuring out what he thought was going on drove me over the edge. I hammered my fists on the table and began shouting about injustice. Almost immediately an armed guard burst into the room and I shut up. "Any more of that and you'll go back to your cell" he said, fixing me with an icy and contemptuous glare, before stalking out of the room again muttering something that sounded an awful lot like "fucking treasonous lefties".

After a prolonged silence, the man claiming to be my lawyer spoke again; "I'm afraid your Special Advocate hasn't really got a chance of getting you off, if what you've told me is true ... You've contributed to a terrorist website, so in the eyes of the law, you're a terrorist".

"But, wait" I pleaded "I wrote those articles nearly five years ago ... ages before the war started ... they weren't even about Iran, they were about economics ... I haven't written anything for them since long before they were banned by the government ... there must be some kind of mistake".

"There is no mistake" he replied using the kind of sympathetic tone only a lawyer telling his client that he's certain to be found guilty could muster, "the legislation banning Press TV was enacted retroactively, meaning anyone that has ever worked for them can be charged with terrorism offences".

I was in shock, "but ... but ... the Tory-UKIP government have reintroduced the death sentence for terrorism offences" I whimpered. "I'm sorry, there's nothing more I can do for you" he said plaintively, easing his corpulent frame out of his chair and heading towards the door.

"But what about my ex-wife?" I pleaded. "If she's been arrested under the same legislation surely this case must be about something else?" "I'm afraid not" he replied. "She knew you were writing for Press TV didn't she?" he asked. "Yes, of course she did" I replied. "Well then she's probably going to be charged with aiding and abetting terrorism".

I couldn't believe what I was hearing but couldn't find the words to express my outrage. "I'm sorry" he said, "I really do have to go now, I've got dozens of other clients in similar situations you see ...".

So here I am, back in my cell, tortured by my Kafkaesque situation. Knowing that I may have been charged with crimes that could carry the death sentence. Knowing that I cannot appeal against the decision of the court, because I will never even be allowed to know what crimes I've been charged with, making the development of an appeal an impossibility. Knowing that the the court decision about my fate could already have been made. Knowing that I'll never even get to see the face of the man responsible for deciding my fate. Knowing that I'll never find out the truth about my situation. Knowing that the next knock on the door could be an armed guard to take me to face a firing squad. All the time, wondering how on earth the public could have let England degenerate into such an Orwellian dystopia.

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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Margaret Thatcher is dead, but her toxic legacies live on

On Monday 8th April 2013 it was announced that the former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was dead. The sense of jubilation at her death was truly remarkable and obviously distressing to the many millions of right-wing people that describe her legacy in glowing terms, even going as far as making claims that she was "the best Prime Minister ever", despite her massive unpopularity and her appalling legacy of failure.

The fact that so many people took to open celebration of her death is evidence of her destructive legacy. The woman clung to power by dividing society and setting the factions against each other, instead of allowing them to unite against her. Even after her death British society is still clearly divided, and the same divisive scapegoating tactics are being used again by the incumbent Tory led government.

Margaret Thatcher and her friend, the murderous
Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979, the first ever adherent of neoliberal pseudo-economics to gain power at the ballot box, rather than through violent US backed military coups. She remained a lifetime friend of her fellow neoliberal adherent, the murderous Chilean dictator General Pinochet, even going as far as direct intervention to assist Pinochet in evading justice after he was threatened with extradition to Spain to face trial for crimes against humanity.

Thatcher's rise to power signaled the end of the post-war consensus mixed economy and the beginning of the neoliberal age. The old agreement between the parties that Britain should strive to balance regulated capitalism with state control over vital infrastructure was torn up in favour of Thatcher's barmy post-industrial dream of a hyper-capitalist nation built around the financial services industry in London.

One of the core tenets of Thatcher's neoliberal agenda was the fire sale of state assets based on the absurdly fallacious reasoning that capitalists can always run things more efficiently than the state. Huge swathes of taxpayer funded industry and infrastructure were given away at bargain basement prices. In some cases such as the sale of British Telecom, the exponential improvements in technology give the impression that privatisation was a success, however the privatisation of utilities like gas, electric and water have severely damaged the UK economy by eroding the disposable income of the public with ever inflating prices, meaning that the public have less money to save or to invest in genuinely productive activity. 

Even after Thatcher's demise, this mania for privatisation continued with all kinds of economically illiterate privatisation scams from John Major's botched privatisation of the railways to Gordon Brown's massive expansion of PFI economic alchemy schemes. Some of the most barmy privatisations include the sale and leaseback of the HMRC property portfolio to a tax haven based company (seriously) and the privatisation of the UK independent nuclear deterrent into the hands of a consortium 66% owned by US based companies!

Another way in which the Thatcher government fueled the City of London post-industrial fantasy was through the abandonment of capital controls and the deregulation of the financial sector, which opened the floodgates to an unprecedented tax-dodging bonanza. In return for these changes, financial sector interests and major tax-dodgers poured cash into Tory party coffers allowing them to present their loopy free-market ideology as some kind of slick modernisation programme through expensive ad agencies such as Saachi and Saachi.

The Thatcher government introduced the new brand of politics where style took precedence over substance and the real political agenda remained hidden behind impenetrable layers of presentation. Subsequent leaders such as Tony Blair and David Cameron have pushed this kind of spin even further, seeming at perfect ease as they outright lie to the public (Iraqi WMDs, David Cameron's debt reduction lies, "No more top-down reorganisations of the NHS", etc).

Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch shared a marriage of convenience.
She allowed him to build up a vast anti-competitive press empire, and he
used that empire to back her policies.

Slick advertising wasn't the only way in which the Thatcher government managed public perception. Thatcher allowed right-wing interests to build up vast media empires. The most famous example being her intervention to ensure that Rupert Murdoch could buy up the Times newspaper. This marriage of convenience between the UK establishment and Rupert Murdoch has continued to the present day. Murdoch commands a huge audience and continues to be sucked up to by British political leaders despite the shocking revelations about the disgusting criminality and corruption at his newspapers.

Aside from handing over valuable state assets for derisory prices and recklessly deregulating the financial sector, another way in which Thatcher coddled the wealthy was through huge tax cuts justified with the ludicrous trickle down fallacy. Allowing the wealthy to extract ever more wealth from society was never going to enrich the poor as the Thatcherites loved to claim, especially given the the way that the Thatcher regime facilitated offshore tax-dodging. 

Instead of investing the glut of North Sea oil wealth and the cash raised through privatisations into a sovereign wealth fund like Norway, or reinvesting it in British industry, Thatcher wasted it all on ludicrous tax breaks for the super wealthy and obvious pre-election bribes for the masses.

Another area in which Thatcher wreaked her havoc was in housing policy. Her loathing of anything social led to her direct attacks upon social housing. Her government arranged the fire sale of social housing with the stipulation that the money raised could not be reinvested in building more social housing or renovating existing social housing stock. The construction of social housing was all but abandoned in the 1980s and has never resumed. Othodox neoliberal theory tells us that a reduction in state intervention in the housing market should lead to a rise in private sector housebuilding, however, just like with most neoliberal theory, the reality has been completely different and this rise in private sector housebuilding never happened. In fact, private sector housebuilding has declined ever since the 1980s. The housing shortage created by Thatcher's assault on social housing led to unsustainable property price inflation, with investors preferring to get fat as ever rising demand pushed their property prices and profit margins upwards, rather than investing in anything economically productive like the actual construction of new houses.

Thatcher also oversaw the deregulation of the private rental sector and the abolition of security of tenure for private tenants. Countless greedy Thatcherites have sat back and raked in the cash as they allowed other people to pay off their buy-to-let mortgages. This idle rentier class is now a clearly defined Tory demographic. In a way, it is a return to the old days of idle landlords soaking up the wealth of entire communities by renting shit houses to transitory "peasants". One of the very worst aspects of Thatcher's housing reforms is that one third of all of the social housing that was sold off on the cheap has now found it's way into the hands of the idle buy-to-let brigade. In fact, probably the largest former council house property portfolio in the entire country belongs to the son of the minister charged with selling off all those state owned properties in the first place!

In order to build the foundations of this ideologically driven neoliberalisation experiment, Thatcher needed to hobble all opposition and consolidate as much power as possible in her own hands. She castrated local government, closed down the Greater London Council and oversaw a centralisation of the education system (based on privately operated exam boards competing to make their exams ever easier to pass) that has churned out generation after generation of inadequately prepared and politically naive students.

Thatcher spent eleven consecutive new years eve celebrations with
Jimmy Savile. The idea that he would have been allowed such a close
relationship with the Prime Minister without being thoroughly vetted by
the security services is frankly laughable.

Undoubtedly the most famous way in which she consolidated her own power was through her war on the trade unions. She famously derided the miners who had been the productive backbone of the nation for centuries as "the enemy within" then removed their union powers and crushed their industries, ruining countless communities throughout the industrial heartlands of the UK. The fact that these communities built around their mines, shipyards, and steel factories were predominantly Labour voting areas was absolutely no coincidence. Not only did she castrate their unions and steal their jobs, she had no plan at all for the regions she was destroying, other than to leave them in a permanent state of destitution and social degeneration. It took the outright defiance of Michael Heseltine to save cities like Liverpool from suffering even more from the brutal indifference of Thatcherism.

Such a centralisation of power runs entirely contrary to the libertarian and minarchist principles that supposedly underpin neoliberal theory, but the only way that such a barmy neoliberalisation process could ever have been enforced was through the ruthless revocation of power from anyone that stood in her way. The fact is that all of Thatcher's successors have all enjoyed the dictatorial powers she carved out for herself, with very few central government powers being redistributed back to local government.

Another defining characteristic of the Thatcher regime was brazen economic mismanagement. The massive inflation peaks in the early and late 1980s; the deliberate neglect of British manufacturing; the ever widening trade deficits; and the fact that her government ran constant budget deficits in all but two of the years for which she was Prime Minister (in fact the 1988 and 1989 budget surpluses are the only Tory budget surpluses recorded since 1973, so perhaps, with an 18% budget surplus rate as compared to 0% for all of her Tory party successors, she wasn't actually that bad by the usual Tory standards).

Still, it didn't seem to matter that interest rates on people's mortgages went through the roof; that the long forgotten phenomena of mass unemployment was stalking the land again after a 50 year hiatus; that British industry was collapsing into terminal decline: The right-wing press and the Tory propaganda machine spun an unrelentingly positive story of "modernisation" and the public lapped it up and carried on voting for her.

Returning to Thatcher's war with the trade unions. The ongoing decline in British manufacturing can be traced back to this divisive class war against the working people of Britain. Thatcher's ideological hatred of the trade unions was so rabid that she would rather the entire industry be destroyed than allow adequate trade union representation for the workforce. A good contrast can be made with Germany, where instead of playing class warfare, with the government and business interests on one side and the workers and trade unions on the other as Thatcher did, they built their industrial strategy on co-operation between the bosses and the unions, even allowing union representatives onto the boards of directors as a matter of course. Thatcher's divide and rule strategy has resulted in decades of industrial decline, social fragmentation and vast trade deficits, whilst Germany have cemented their place as world leader in the production of high tech machinery, successfully reunified their divided nation and run enormous trade surpluses.

Any commentary on Thatcher would be incomplete without mention of the Falklands. It is quite clear from declassified documents that the conflict was deliberately provoked through the withdrawal of the South Atlantic naval defence. Thatcher was warned several times by military experts that such a withdrawal would be seen as an open invitation for the Argentine military dictatorship to invade. In the buildup to the invasion, Thatcher was languishing in the polls, the most unpopular Prime Minister in history. After the Falklands victory she rode the tide of jingoism to a landslide election victory and a whitewash investigation concluded that the war had been "unavoidable".

Another incident that must not be forgotten is the Hillsborough disaster where 96 Liverpool FC fans were crushed to death due to police incompetence. It took 23 years for the evidence to be released. Evidence which demonstrates beyond any doubt that the Thatcher government and South Yorkshire police colluded in a massive cover-up campaign, where blame was deliberately transferred to innocent Liverpool supporters with the willing assistance of the right-wing press. Especially the S*n, (belonging to Thatcher's chum Rupert Murdoch) which is still boycotted in the city of Liverpool to this day as a result of the outright lies that were printed about the behavior of Liverpool fans on that tragic day.

The final factor that cannot possibly be excluded is the policy that eventually brought the Thatcher regime down. By the late 1980s Thatcher must have come to believe that she was invincible. She'd crushed the unions, castrated local government, sold off the national silver on the cheap, slashed taxes for her wealthy backers and done it all with three landslide victories at the polls. Her final folly was Poll Tax; a policy so unpopular that it provoked the largest wave of civil disobedience in living memory. Only a power crazed fool with a head full of neoliberal gibberish could possibly have thought that they could get away with imposing it. She was warned by her Tory party colleagues that it wouldn't float but she persisted with it until she was driven out of office by her own MPs.

Only the blue tinted spectacles brigade would even try to pretend that Thatcher didn't leave the UK countless toxic legacies such as over-centralised power, adherence to ideological neoliberal pseudo-economics, countless failed privatisations, the massive scale of tax-dodging, industrial decline, mass unemployment, housing policy neglect, rising debt (national, corporate and private), a hopelessly mismanaged education system, political subservience to the Murdoch propaganda empire and the reckless gambling of the deregulated financial sector that eventually led to the global financial sector meltdown. 

Probably the single thing that stands out above all of these toxic legacies is the way that Thatcher ruthlessly reversed the gains of the post war society, cynically setting sectors of society at each others throats whilst deliberately re-extending the wealth gap.

Another of Thatcher's toxic legacies was Tony Blair. Many Tories try to deny the link between Thatcher and Blair, however the similarity is absolutely obvious to most people. Tony Blair was quite clearly a Tory in a red tie. Instead of undoing the damage that Thatcher had wrought, he intensified it with more privatisations, more dodgy outsourcing contracts, more Murdoch love-ins, more bank deregulations, more tax-dodging scams and more deliberate neglect of British industry. Even the most rabid Tory would hesitate to contradict Thatcher herself ,and when asked what her greatest achievement in politics was, her reply was "Tony Blair and New Labour". The affection between the two was mutual, with Blair providing a grotesquely uncritical eulogy to the sworn enemy of anyone remotely left-wing or socially liberal:

"Margaret Thatcher was a towering political figure. Very few leaders get to change not only the political landscape of their country but of the world. Margaret was such a leader. Her global impact was vast. And some of the changes she made in Britain were, in certain respects at least, retained by the 1997 Labour Government... As a person she was kind and generous spirited and was always immensely supportive to me as Prime Minister ...  you could not disrespect her character or her contribution to Britain's national life. She will be sadly missed."

Tony Blair was obviously saddened to hear of the death of his ideological mentor. I thought that I'd actually be much happier on the day that Thatcher finally died. However, it is absolutely clear from the shape of the UK political landscape that she is actually still alive. All three of the establishment parties are now wedded to her brand of ideologically driven orthodox neoliberalism; the scars of her economic blundering can be seen carved across the landscape and across countless communities; the gap between rich and poor is wider than ever and still growing; the post war welfare system is under ruthless attack; crony capitalism and industrial scale tax-dodging are rife and the tactic of playing elements of society off against each other in order to distract attention away from the villainy of the establishment powers is even more prevalent today than it was at the height of Thatcherism.

It doesn't matter that the woman is so reviled that her grave would need to be kept behind a security cordon to prevent it from becoming an extremely popular open air toilet. It doesn't matter that she is dead and that people are satisfied that she is gone. Her toxic legacy has not gone, in fact, the current Tory government are busy with schemes that Thatcher herself would never have dared dream of, such as privatising the NHS and simply giving away thousands of schools in England (£billions worth of taxpayer funded property and all) for free, to unaccountable private sector interests (including several major Tory party donors).

It is 34 years since Thatcher introduced neoliberal pseudo-economics to the UK and we're still paying the price now. Hell, we'll still be paying the price in another 34 years given that the entire political establishment is utterly riddled with this rotten ideology. The economic and social destruction she inflicted can never be fully repaired. Too many industries destroyed, too many taxes dodged, too many communities divided, too many lives ruined and too many generations brought up on the right-wing mantra of "greed good; social conscience bad".

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Daily Mail: Politicising child killing to attack the social safety net

April 3rd 2013 witnessed one of the most "vile" newspaper headlines in British history, when the Daily Mail used the tragic killing of 6 kids to smear the welfare system.

This kind of headline shouldn't really be a surprise from a rag that once ran the headline "Hurrah for the blackshirts", above an article written by the proprietor Lord Rothmere (a personal friend of both Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler) which praised Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists.

The blatant politicisation of the deaths of children in order to justify Tory attacks on the welfare system was condemned by the liberal commentator Owen Jones and several Labour MPs. 

The Daily Telegraph ran a moralising meta-reaction piece condemning the Daily Mail headline and also criticising the left-wing reaction too, which is a bit bloody rich given that the Daily Telegraph coverage of the Mick Philpott conviction was almost as bad as the Daily Mail's, opening as it did with "Mick Philpott, who has lived his life off the state benefit handouts...".

The right-wing press in the UK are sick. They have a fetish for destruction of the welfare system and they consider absolutely anything (even the deaths of children) as appropriate ammunition in their war against the social safety net.

Representatives of the right-wing press, especially the Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre have been amongst the loudest opponents of greater press regulation, which, the way the political establishment have set it up, actually looks more like a charter to restrict the freedoms and activities of independent bloggers like myself, investigative journalists and the anti-corruption magazine Private Eye than an effort to rein in the criminality of the right-wing press. It must be remembered that the whole reason for the Levenson report in the first place was the brazen criminality of the Murdoch press, yet the regulations have been drawn up in a very ambiguous way, so that independent bloggers like me can be treated as if we are publishing empires.

Grotesquely misleading and offensive headlines capitalising on the deaths of children in order to score political points, like this one from the Daily Mail, just create even more ammunition for the press regulation campaign that they supposedly oppose. The worst thing is that the Mail and the Murdoch press (that provoked Leveson and then provides supporters of press regulation with exactly the kind of ammunition they need with headlines like this) will be able to afford the lawyers to defend themselves once the new press regulations come in, independent bloggers like me are the ones that must either shut up or run the risk of being denied legal representation and bankrupted under the new "press regulation" system.

 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 "Making Work Pay" fallacy

I've written a number of articles detailing the right-wing propaganda war aimed at justifying the economic persecution of the unemployed. Yet, even after having the meaning of the term "scrounger narrative" explained to them, tribalist tories and the cognitively illiterate simply retort with more facile "scrounger narratives" and reactionary justification fallacies.

One of the most commonly heard justification fallacies in conjunction with the scrounger narrative goes along the lines of:

"Why should idle unemployed scroungers get more than working people. The Tories are 'making work pay' and I agree with the welfare cuts"

There are countless problems with this kind of simplistic pseudo-opinion (a political stance taken directly from the pages of the right-wing press and presented as one's own, as opposed to a genuine opinion based on critical analysis of facts and statistics) however I'll try to just stick to the fact that the "making work pay" rhetoric is ridiculously counter-factual.

Tory ministers repeat variations of the "making work pay" theme over and over again, like some kind of religious mantra. Here's an example from the Tory Minister for Work and Pensions, Iain Duncan Smith:

"We are modernising the welfare system so that work always pays"

The problem with this position is absolutely obvious to anyone that has paid the slightest amount of attention to the bills that have been passed through parliament by the coalition government. Take the widely celebrated 2013 Benefits Uprating Bill, which is a great example of Orwellian use of language. The title of the bill includes the word "uprating", yet the purpose of the bill is to impose real terms cuts on all  forms of welfare payment, a more honest name would have been "the 2013 Benefits Downrating Bill".

The justification narrative in support of this attack on welfare payments was the same tired old "why should the unemployed get more" appeal to the public sense of injustice. Yet, the vast majority of welfare payments to be slashed in real terms are benefits that get paid to working people. The benefits that will be restricted to below inflation rises include; Working Tax Credit, Child Tax Credit, Housing Benefit, Child Benefit, Maternity Pay, Paternity Pay, Council Tax Benefit and Statutory Sick Pay.


It is absolutely astonishing that a huge swathe of the public have accepted the utterly misleading narrative that this bill was about cutting benefits payments to the unemployed, when the vast majority of people to lose income through this benefits cut will be the working poor and 90% of families with children! The evidence is absolutely clear to those that can be bothered to look for it; the amount of money that gets paid out in unemployment benefits is absolutely dwarfed by other welfare payments such as Pensions, Housing Benefit and Working Tax Credits.

This attack on in-work benefits isn't the only example of Tory policy flatly contradicting their narrative that they are striving to ensure that "work always pays". Ever since they got into power, the Tories have rapidly expanded the Neo-Labour policy of treating the unemployed as a source of free labour via various mandatory unpaid "workfare" schemes. The narrative that you are striving to ensure that "work always pays" is completely and totally undermined if you design a load of unlawful Labour party approved schemes to force people to work for free, often at highly profitable, foreign owned corporations at the taxpayers' expense. Is there any clearer example of making sure work doesn't pay" than forcing people onto mandatory unpaid labour schemes?

In March 2013 George Osborne announced in his budget that the Bank of England will be made to give the fight against inflation a lower priority. This comes after 33 consecutive months of average wage rises being outpaced by inflation. For 33 consecutive months of Tory rule, the costs of living has risen faster than the average wage. For almost three years, high inflation has made working people poorer.

Instead of understanding that this disparity is eroding the disposable income of millions of families, causing a fall in economic demand, and then doing something about it; Osborne is doing the opposite; he's essentially giving up the fight against inflation.

Osborne actually seems happy that because of high inflation, millions of working families are significantly worse off in real terms than they were three years ago; that millions of families have less disposable income; that economic demand is being stymied because millions of families are cutting expenditure in order to make their salaries (that are shrinking in real terms) stretch further. It seems very odd indeed that a government with a commitment to "making work pay" would allow inflation to erode the salaries of millions of workers doesn't it?

In April 2013 the Tory party began attacking the National Minimum Wage, claiming that it should be frozen, or even cut. This too seems like a very odd stance for a party that won't shut up about "making work pay". It is obvious that the National Minimum Wage is not actually set high enough, because the vast majority of state benefits are actually paid out to the working poor. 

These in-work benefits are paid to low paid employees as a form of government subsidy to businesses that refuse to pay their staff a living wage. Yet the Tories are keen to slash the level of poverty wage that employers are allowed to pay their staff and to slash the in-work benefits that low paid workers receive from the state to save them from destitution. This is a pretty bizarre way to demonstrate their commitment to ensuring that "work always pays" is it not?

The Tory narrative that they are "making work pay" is brazenly dishonest. They have used it in conjunction with scrounger narratives to launch a massive raid on in-work benefits; they have allowed inflation to soar above wage rises for almost three years straight; they have begun attacking the National Minimum Wage; and most brazenly of all, they have coerced hundreds of thousands of people onto mandatory unpaid "Workfare" schemes, which are the clearest possible demonstration of their absolute commitment to ensure that work doesn't pay.

I've presented four absolutely clear cut examples of how the "making work pay" rhetoric is a lie (real terms cuts to in-work benefits, unpaid "Workfare" schemes, soaring inflation and attacks on the National Minimum Wage) but such is the scale of confirmation bias with the Tory besotted right-wing reactionary, that they'll be able to read all of this and respond with another reiteration of the simplistic propaganda that they plucked directly from the pages of the S*n/Mail/Telegraph and adopted as their own political opinion. They'll retort with the same kind of counter-factual fallacious reasoning that has been utterly demolished before their very eyes. It seems that these people are beyond help. My reliable evidence, statistical proof and critical analysis are as meaningless to them as their rhetoric, anecdotal evidence, cherry picked data and scrounger narratives are to us thinking people.

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The flawed Bedroom Tax justification narrative

We've all heard the justification narrative for the coalition government plans to financially penalise hundreds of thousands of the poorest and most vulnerable people in society for supposedly "under-occupying" their homes, via a scheme that has come to be dubbed the "Bedroom Tax". The endlessly repeated justification goes along the lines of "why should they get to live in a bigger house than they need? They should be forced to move to a smaller property so that larger families can move into their property".

I've stated this several times before, but I'll state it again for the record: You'd have to be pretty damn naive to believe the stated intention of any government. It is always a good idea to try to read between the lines and establish what you think the hidden agenda is. Unquestioning acceptance of the government line on any issue is pretty naive, but in the case of "Bedroom Tax" it shows a remarkable willingness to ignore the wealth of evidence that the "freeing up larger properties" narrative has more holes in it than a colander.

The first, and probably the most obvious indicator that the real intention has little or nothing to do with "freeing up larger properties" is that pensioners are exempt. Pensioners are by far the most common under-occupiers of larger social housing properties, yet the Tories decided to let them keep their "oversized" houses. The motivation for exempting single pensioners or couples that may be occupying 3, 4 or even 5 bedroom social properties is obvious. Pensioners are the single biggest Tory demographic. The Tories know that the majority of social housing tenants don't vote Tory, but they are petrified of a wider pensioner backlash if they are seen to be forcing pensioners out of their homes. Hence, the single biggest supply of under-occupied social housing will not be reallocated through collective financial punishment, for party political reasons.

The next problem is the abject lack of smaller accommodation. Even if people wanted to "downsize" their property, there simply isn't enough smaller accommodation available for everyone to do it. To put the scale of this shortage into perspective, the figures from Hull show that 4,700 families are due to be hit by "Bedroom Tax" yet there are only 73 smaller properties available, meaning that even if every smaller property is allocated to "Bedroom tax" refugees, that will only be enough for 1.56% of them, the other 98.4% will have to pay the charge, or seek private sector accommodation.

What makes the lack of smaller social housing even more of a problem is the few properties that are available won't generally go to relocating tenants from larger properties because high priority cases (such as the homeless and families living in temporary accommodation) always get priority access and there are vast waiting lists for social property in nearly every area.

The next clear demonstration that the policy has very little to do with the stated objective of "freeing up larger properties" is that the government repeatedly claim that "Bedroom tax" will save £480 million a year. It turns out that in order to calculate this guesstimated figure they have assumed that 85% of people will not be forced out of their homes by the "Bedroom Tax" charges. Slamming 17 low income families with additional housing costs in order to incentivise just 3 families to relocate is basically a form of collective punishment. The Tories know that most people will be either unwilling, or more commonly unable, to move out of their family home and they've worked that failure of their repeatedly stated justification into their financial projections.

Sticking with the endlessly repeated claims that "Bedroom Tax" will save £480 million a year, this flatly contradicts their "freeing up larger properties" narrative. Either the "Bedroom Tax" is about reallocation of property, or it is about saving £480 million at the expense of some of the poorest and most vulnerable families in the UK. It can't be both.

Another problem with the narrative that "Bedroom Tax" is all about "freeing up larger properties", is due to the chronic shortage of smaller social housing properties, large numbers of families that are financially penalised out of their homes would end up moving into the private rental sector, where rents are vastly more expensive, with higher rates of Housing Benefit. The fact is that people fleeing "Bedroom Tax" would actually be entitled to significantly higher Housing Benefit payments for their their smaller private sector properties, than they were initially receiving for their larger social housing properties. The remarkable thing about this is, that the more successful this policy is in meeting the stated objective of "freeing up larger social properties", the more it is going to cost the taxpayer in increased Housing Benefits payments. Once again, this is evidence that if the stated "freeing up properties" justification is realistic, then the £480 million projection is false, and if the £480 million projection is accurate then the "freeing up larger properties" narrative is a load of rubbish.

Given their undying devotion to the pumping public funds into the private sector and assurances from the likes of Welfare Reform Minister David Anthony "Lord" Freud that he is not expecting private sector landlords "to suffer a large loss of income" due to Tory welfare reform policies, it is not difficult to imagine that the "Bedroom tax" is actually a scheme designed to siphon more taxpayers' cash (via private sector Housing Benefit subsidies) into the bank accounts of private landlords.

Scratch beneath the Tory propaganda and it becomes pretty obvious that "Bedroom Tax" has nothing to do with "encouraging" families to move into more appropriate accommodation and everything to do with financially penalising hundreds of thousands of the poorest and most vulnerable people in society, with the "added bonus" (from a tory perspective) of shifting even more public cash into the private sector. It is not, as the reactionary Tory apologist likes to claim it is a policy aimed at "freeing up larger properties", it is, in fact, a vindictive scheme to collectively punish the poor and further enrich the wealthy.

"Bedroom tax" is Tory malice dressed up as social engineering.

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