Corruption
The Rwanda Bill contravenes human rights and the Tories do not care
These are the lead paragraphs from an FT report this morning:
The Tories will continue with the Bill nonetheless. That's why we know they are fascists. In the face of warnings, they are continuing to pursue policies that are racist and deny us all our human rights. No other interpretation of their political creed is really now possible given those facts.
But remember, when Labour could have voted to kill this Bill they did not. They, too, have questions to answer.
When do we admit that we live in a state where the rule of law no longer applies?
As the Guardian reports this morning:
Protesters who wear masks could face arrest, up to a month in jail and a £1,000 fine under proposed measures that human rights campaigners claim are pandering to “culture war nonsense”.
The Guardian adds:
Demonstrators will no longer be able to use the right to protest as a reasonable excuse if they commit public order offences such as serious disruption.
Right in front of our eyes, our basic human rights, including the right to offer a defence in court, are being destroyed, and Labour stands aside and lets all this happen as another sure sign that they are both LINO (Labour In Name Only) and the TCP (Tory Continuity Party).
I am sickened, as well as profoundly worried.
When do we admit that we live in a state where the rule of law no longer applies? It has to be soon if it has not already happened.
Government is us – or should be…
Government undermining itself is a recipe for a broken society – such as now exists in the UK. We have to realise that when the government is us – it starts locally and works up… Soon after the Tories gained power – presumably mindful of the ever harsher local government cuts in the offing, they... Read more
Government is us – or should be…
Government undermining itself is a recipe for a broken society – such as now exists in the UK. We have to realise that when the government is us – it starts locally and works up… Soon after the Tories gained power – presumably mindful of the ever harsher local government cuts in the offing, they... Read more
Truss is promoting an agenda that explicitly permits the powerful with a grudge to abuse anyone they wish with impunity
I should be grateful to GB News. They appear to be the only news organisation that was willing to carry verbatim extracts from Liz Truss's speech to the so-called Popular Conservatives yesterday.
They report her as saying:
I believe the fundamental issue is that for years and years and years- and I think it goes back two decades - conservatives have not taken on the left-wing extremists.
These people have repurposed themselves. They don't admit they're socialists or communists anymore, they say they're 'environmentalists'. They say that they're in favour of helping people across all communities. They are in favour of supporting LGBT people or groups of ethnic minorities.
They also noted her saying:
They no longer admit that they are collectivists - but that is what their ideology is about. It's all about taking power away from people and families and handing power to the state or unaccountable bodies.
And the problem is, the conservatives have tried to appease these people. They've tried to triangulate.
[A]nd we've had pandering to the anticapitalists as well, in terms of regulating business, regulating landlords, regulating small enterprises.
Our shortest-serving ever Prime Minister has spoken. It is fair to say that the words she had to offer delivered an ugly and offensive message. Most will think them deranged. I think they are dangerous.
Truss is really saying three things.
First, she wants a white, male-privileged society that is focused on the supposed Christian values of the family, which is defined to exclude any LGBT people, and with the values and principles of any minority group being treated as aberrant and offensive and so to be subject to permitted prejudice.
Second, she wants to define all forms of collective concern, including for the environment and for society itself, as a threat to the right of the individual to exploit the planet and others.
Third, she wishes to end business regulation so it can exploit the consumer, the planet, places, tenants, and others without showing any apparent awareness that markets cannot function in the absence of regulation.
This is, then, an agenda that explicitly permits the powerful with a grudge to abuse anyone they wish with impunity. And anything that gets in the way, like democratic government and the rule of law, must be vilified or abolished.
This is beyond being called far-right ideology. This is fascism. It should be described as such because no other word in the political lexicon fits it.
First they came for Just Stop Oil
Occasionally I read something I think worth sharing in full on this blog. I did yesterday. It was on the blog of an old friend, Jonathon Porritt, who has spent a lifetime campaigning on environmental issues. With his permission, I share it in full here, having only edited some formatting:
First they came for Just Stop Oil; then they came for radical environmentalists; then they came for members of the National Trust, the RSPB, and WWF. But there was no one left to speak for them.
I know I shouldn’t be, but I’m astonished at the lack of concern/interest on the part of “mainstream environmentalists” as we slide inexorably into a police state. The right to peaceful protest is still a basic human right. But you sure as hell wouldn’t know that here in the UK.
On January 23rd, Michel Forst (the UN Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders under the Aarhus Convention) issued his interim report after his visit to the UK earlier in the month. It’s astonishing. In his own words:
- “As the UN Human Rights Committee has made clear, States have a duty to facilitate the right to protest, and private entities and broader society may be expected to accept some level of disruption as a result of the exercise of this right.”
- “Peaceful protesters are being prosecuted and convicted under the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, for the criminal offence of “Public Nuisance”, which is punishable by up to 10 years imprisonment. I was also informed that the Public Order Act 2023 is being used to further criminalise peaceful protest.”
- “In some recent cases, presiding judges have forbidden environmental defenders from explaining to the jury their motivation for participating in a given protest or from mentioning climate change at all”.
- “I am deeply troubled at the use of civil injunctions to ban protests in certain areas, including on public roadways. Anyone who breaches this injunctions is liable for up to two years imprisonment and an unlimited fine.”
- “Prior to these legislative developments, it had been almost unheard of since the 1930s for members of the public to be imprisoned for peaceful protest in the UK. I am therefore seriously concerned by these regressive new laws”.
Michel Forst is telling it as he sees it. But I’m not sure most mainstream environmentalists actually understand what is currently going on out there.
- Marcus Decker and Morgan Trowland got the longest sentences in UK modern history for protesting, given 2 years and 7 months, and 3 years respectively, after climbing the Queen Elizabeth II bridge over the Dartford Crossing with a Just Stop Oil banner.
- Defendants on trial for public nuisance, after a peaceful protest, were forbidden from saying the words climate change, fuel poverty and the civil rights movement.
- Steven Gingell was jailed for six months after pleading guilty to being in a peaceful protest march on a London Road. This sentence is thought to be the first jailing under the Public Order Act 2023, which has an offence of “interference with key national infrastructure”
- Tim Hughes, a 73-year-old clergyman, was arrested in November 2022, and charged with Conspiracy to Cause a Public Nuisance. He was on remand in Wandsworth Prison for 6 weeks, then released on bail in January 2023, subject to wearing a tag. His trial is not scheduled until February 2025. Two years wearing a tag – without having been convicted of any offence!
- Civil injunctions have been issued to hundreds of individuals. A breach could mean imprisonment and/or an unlimited fine.
- Trudi Warner, a retired Social Worker, is being prosecuted for Contempt of Court for holding up a sign outside of a court defending the right of juries to decide a case on conscience.
(My huge thanks to Sandra Laville at the Guardian, and to Anita Mureithi at OpenDemocracy, for providing these updates.)
Trudi Warner’s case has been taken up by Defend our Juries (@defendourjuries). On the 4th December, 600 people in 52 locations protested outside Crown Courts to defend the right of juries to decide a verdict on the basis of their conscience. (Their next Day of Action is on February 21st). As the Guardian recently pointed out: “A jury’s power to acquit had been seen for decades as a “constitutional safeguard” – insurance that the criminal law should conform to the ordinary person’s idea of what is fair that notion is held in contempt, evidently, by ministers”.
So here’s my request – to help ward off despair. Or rather, two requests:
- Can anybody send me chapter and verse, in the public domain, from any of the mainstream environmental organisations, condemning any of this in the same terms as Michel Forst?
- Can anybody send me chapter and verse, in the public domain, of anyone in the Labour Shadow Cabinet, condemning any of this in the same terms as Michel Forst?
These are genuine requests for information – to dispel my worst fears about gutless mainstream NGOs and equally gutless Labour politicians.
January 15th was Martin Luther King day in the USA. Ben Philips, Director of Communications for UNAID, wrote an excellent blog to mark the day:
“When Dr King said the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice, he didn’t mean this process is automatic; as he noted, “social progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of people.” Justice, Dr King taught, is never given, it is only ever won. This always involves having the courage to confront power. Indeed, he noted, the greatest stumbling block to progress is not the implacable opponent, but those who claim to support change but are “more devoted to order than justice”. As he put it, “frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action movement that was “well-timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly. This “wait!” has almost always meant “never”.
Please think of those words every time you leap to condemn the tactics of young climate campaigners here in the UK, even as our police state closes down on them more and more repressively.
And if you need any confirmation of what’s going on here, please read George Monbiot’s brilliant article in the Guardian on Saturday 3rd February (“It’s a Plutocrat’s World – and all Dissenters are Swiftly Crushed”):
“Why, in the UK, can you now potentially receive a longer sentence for “public nuisance” – non-violent civil disobedience – than for rape or manslaughter? Peaceful environmental campaigners are being held on bail for up to 2 years, subjected to electronic tags, GPS tracking and curfews. Even before you’ve been tried, let alone found guilty, your life is shredded.”
And he tellingly adds exactly why these deep injustices are now becoming common place:
“Why is all this happening? Because the UK, the US and many other nations have become closed shops run by the Plutocrats’ Trade Union. Inequality demands oppression. The more concentrated wealth and power become, the more those who challenge the rich and powerful must be hounded and crushed”.
And isn’t that the truth of it?
‘Sudan is Neither Cursed nor a Lost Cause’
Life in Sudan has long been tortuous. Dr Habib, an orthopaedist, fled the east African nation for Britain in 1991 after receiving multiple early insights into how brutal corruption would manifest under Omar al-Bashir, a general who swept to power in a military coup two years earlier.
First, Dr Habib found himself treating the victims of police violence in his place of work, the Khartoum Teaching Hospital. Incidents spiked after the extreme impostion of Sharia Law following al-Bashir's ascent to power.
Subsequently, the doctor received visits from the secret police, the National Intelligence and Security Service, instructing him to sign papers denying injuries had been incurred by victims of the abuse. Dr Habib refused. But he received further visits, and the requests grew graver still, soliciting support to perform amputations on others found guilty of breaching Sharia Law.
When Dr Habib again refused to acquiesce with the state, he was summoned to court. “How dare you refuse?” came the cry before he was struck by a prosecutor. 33 years on, Dr Habib remains incredulous that he was slapped in open court, and so traumatised as to be unable to talk about what else he experienced while detained ahead of the hearing.
Dr Habib was able to escape, granted asylum by the UK Government along with other Christian refugees who he says queued with him overnight to join rescue flights out of the former colony. However, with his medical qualifications not recognised outside of Sudan, his musculoskeletal skills have gone unused in England. It was too expensive and time consuming to retrain in the UK, with a young family to support.
Sudan would benefit from an additional doctor right now, with the country nine months into a catastrophic civil war only eclipsed by the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine. The Khartoum Teaching Hospital in which Dr Habib used to be proud to work was destroyed in the first throws of battle last spring.
It was the largest hospital in the country, with its initial units built under former British rule. It will take seven years to rebuild, the government's health department has said. Even if the war ended tomorrow, patients will struggle to find specialist support for all manner of injuries or illnesses for the foreseeable future.
Patients are suffering from violent corruption in Sudan now, just as they were back in 1991. What has changed is that the suffering is now more heavily militarised, with bombs being dropped on the heads and hospitals of civilians by forces that should be in place to protect not pulverise.
It wasn't supposed to be this way. Millions of Sudanese rose up in peaceful protests in 2018-19, successfully ousting al-Bashir – later jailed for corruption – and mobilising for the dissolution of his National Congress Party. The future looked brighter.
However, fighting involving the Sudanese Armed Forces and their shadow army, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), erupted after negotiations on the timeline for integrating the RSF broke down. At least seventeen hospitals have been bombed to date, according to reports shared by the United Nations.
More than two thirds of the hospitals in the nation's conflict hotspots are now out of service, with a dozen being used as barracks. The scale of the carnage reveals how readily the UN's arms embargo, imposed on Sudan back in 2004, has been evaded over the past two decades.
Through steady exploitation of the country's gold, both military factions have grown rich and resourced in weapons frequently used against their own people, even before this latest war which has cost more than 12,000 lives.
The Government turned a blind eye when Darfur's 'gold mountain' was seized by force by the Janjaweed militia – which later evolved into the RSF – in 2012. The Government again looked the other way when the RSF breached the country's constitution to cash in on the precious metal. It suited al-Bashir, an unelected dictator, to have not one but two powerful armies to reinforce his grip.
The UAE has long traded with the RSF, who have lent the Gulf nation fighters in the past. Most recently gold has been traded for Wagner missiles on the Libyan border, satellite imagery suggests. British firms also have blood on their hands after selling vehicles and ammunition into the country in recent years.
Sudan is sometimes dismissed as a lost cause, a case study in corruption-related conflict. But its capacity to stockpile arms in contravention of a long-standing embargo implicates exporters and international regulators as much as it does the two armies engaged in what has become an intractable bloodbath.
Corruption is unhealthy. Dr Habib can testify to that. So can all those who remain suffering in Sudan, along with a large domestic and international cast of enablers.
The Tory abuse of freedom
As the Guardian notes this morning:
The director of public prosecutions is appealing to the supreme court in an ongoing and expensive battle to overturn the acquittal of two protesters found to have acted reasonably in calling Iain Duncan Smith “Tory scum”.
The background to the case is that:
Ruth Wood, 52, and Radical Haslam, 30, were found not guilty in November 2022 of using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour with intent after a two-day trial in Manchester magistrates court.
They had been outside the Midland hotel in Manchester, where the Conservative party annual conference was taking place in October 2021 [and....] separately called him “Tory scum”. Wood added:“Fuck off out of Manchester.”
As was noted in court:
Wood had successfully defended her comments on the grounds that her job working with homeless people in her local community meant she felt very strongly about the impact Conservative party policies were having on people’s lives. Duncan Smith was the work and pensions secretary from 2010 to 2016.
Haslam’s comments were made in a speech in which he cited child poverty, homelessness and a lack of action over the climate emergency as reasons “why people hate you, why people call you scum”. He added: “It doesn’t come out of nowhere. It comes from what you have done to ordinary people’s lives … shame on you, Tory scum.”
As the Guardian then notes:
In clearing the two protesters, Judge Goldspring, who is also described as the chief magistrate, had noted that “the use of Tory scum was to highlight the policies” of Duncan Smith and that this was relevant to the “reasonableness of the conduct” in relation to the rights of freedom of expression and assembly.
Goldspring added: “The use of those words did not amount to an offence, as in the circumstances it was reasonable.”
The government sought a judicial review of the decision. It was found that the decision involved no fault in law.
So they are now going to the Supreme Court to try to overturn these decisions and make it a crime to call a Tory minister 'scum'.
They justify this by saying:
We have a duty to ensure that that we understand the reasoning of a court so that we can correctly apply any considerations to future cases and charging decisions. This appeal was pursued because what is required, for all concerned, is clarity and certainty.
There is a technical description for that, which is it is drivel (other words could be used).
The reality is that the Tories want to limit free speech.
The courts would not do it.
Making a justified claim that the Tories are scum is clearly a legal thing to do.
Unless you are a Tory minister, of course, whose aim here is to politicise the Supreme Court, whatever the outcome. Which looks like the actions of Tory enemies of free speech to me.
Welcome to Singapore-on-Thames, the chosen destination of Starmer, Reeves and Streeting
I admit that this post is not based on one of my ideas. It is instead based on my wife's reaction to hearing Rachel Reeves on Radio 4 this morning.
Her reaction was to suggest that we now live in a one-party state that exists to support the City of London.
When the debate on Brexit was at its peak, it was suggested that the real aim of the exercise was to create Singaore-on-Thames in which a one-party state is created to support a very particular form of capitalism that most in the country are destined to serve but not benefit from.
At the time, the existence of a Labour Party that challenged such ideas made it easy to dismiss that suggestion.
But now the Labour Party has been captured, has become Labour In Name Only (LINO) and the TCP (Tory Continuity Party) and the realisation that we now face an election as meaningful as any in Singapore, where a single party has ruled since 1959, is shortly going to dawn on the people of this country.
My wife is right: that's where we are now.
Welcome to Singapore-on-Thames, the chosen destination of Starmer, Reeves and Streeting.
Labour’s plan for the City is grossly irresponsible and could lead to a repeat of 2008
As the Guardian and others have reported:
Labour has pledged to “unashamedly champion” the UK’s financial services sector, as it promised to cut down 10,000 pages of regulations and ruled out a windfall tax on bank profits.
The detail of this story does not matter, largely because there is little of it. This is a story about Labour policy after all: beyond a headline, there is never anything very much to one of those.
But what we do know is that:
- Labour intends to slash City regulation.
- It will not tax banks more.
- Bankers' bonus caps would not be reinstated.
- It will be demanding 350 free banking hubs in the UK - so one for roughly every 120,000 adult people, which is obviously (not) going to solve the problem of access to free banking services.
- It wants UK resident people to invest a lot more in shares, even though we know this almost never delivers new funding for investment.
Politely, this is gross irresponsibility.
It not only makes Labour a cheerleader for the sector that has done more than any other to bring the country to its current dire state but also closes another route to tax and simultaneously abandons the duty the government has to provide people with the banking and savings services that they need so that their money is safe.
What does this feel like? Gordon Brown in about 2005 is what this feels like, and he, of course, helped create the crash of 2008 and all that followed by his own responsibility in this area.
I can't quite believe that Labour is stupid enough not to learn even the most basic lesson from its own history, but apparently, it has not. In my opinion, the deep-seated lure of securing a well-paid job in the City after being in office does, even now and before Labour has got into office, lead them to appease the sector that needs most of all to be reformed if the economy of this country is going to serve the needs of the people who live within it.
I really do despair of them. Stupidity of this sort is off the scale that I thought it possible to measure.