#tories unfit to govern

[lost-carcosa]

[mariacallous]

It would, Grant Shapps says, be bad news for British democracy if Labour won too large a majority next month. For a moment I wondered whether his words reflected a realisation that his own party had only been able to manage stable government this century when it was in coalition with someone else, but I don’t think this was his point. 

It’s true that governments with small majorities are more constrained, but this isn’t obviously a good thing. Our years of Brexit deadlock were only broken once the government had a comfortable majority. And if you believe, as some on the right claim they do, that Britain needs planning reform and plenty of housebuilding, then a Labour government with a large majority is the likeliest route to those things. Certainly the Conservatives haven’t been able to deliver them with theirs.

But let me offer a different counterargument: it would be very good for our democracy for the Conservative Party to suffer a crushing defeat. The Conservatives have behaved terribly in government, and politicians, like children, need to know that their actions have consequences.

In 2019, British voters were faced with an unusual and appalling situation: a choice between two men both utterly unfit to be prime minister. Leaving aside Jeremy Corbyn’s political abilities — he could never persuade even Labour MPs that he ought to head a government — and his instincts — he would go on to suggest the British government had provoked Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — he had neither the temperament nor the intellect for the top job. So voters opted for what they perceived to be the lesser of two evils.

The result was that Labour paid a price for offering an unfit leader, and the Conservatives were rewarded. And that has been a bad thing. It told Tories that integrity in public life was optional. Boris Johnson, of course, needed no encouragement on that score, but his weak-minded followers, in Parliament, on his staff, and in the media, thought they had won a free pass. “Voters don’t care,” we were assured, after each fresh scandal broke. Until it turned out that they did. 

For all their later cries of anguish as Boris Johnson’s character was laid bare on the public stage, Conservatives knew exactly who he was when they made him prime minister. If the precise details of his downfall were pleasingly novel — who had “locks up the nation while hosting a series of wild parties” on their bingo card? — it was no surprise that he thought rules were for other people and lied as was convenient. This had been his entire career. I hope my colleague Paul Goodman will forgive me reminding him of what was surely the greatest ever ConservativeHome editorial, which suggested that Johnson should be prime minister, but with rival Jeremy Hunt as a deputy, to handle the tedious business of running the country. Has any endorsement ever been less enthusiastic?

Conservative MPs knew who Johnson was during the 2019 election campaign, when he insisted his Brexit proposals wouldn’t create a regulatory border in the Irish Sea. Did any Tory correct the prime minister as he misled voters about a key feature of the deal that was the centrepiece of his election campaign? Of course not. Voters don’t care!

And that’s just Johnson. Is there any Conservative out there who wants to argue that, since their party took sole charge of the country in 2015, they have been a good government? Four years spent arguing about Brexit followed by 18 months of a lockdown policy that was conspicuously more interested in pubs than schools, and then three years of infighting. There are bright spots — the vaccine and the leadership on Ukraine — but the main theme has been chaos. We have had as many chancellors of the exchequer in the last nine years as we did in the preceding 30. 

And what is there to show for it? The party’s central economic policy has been to make it harder for British businesses to sell things to France. And, in fairness, it has achieved that — even if, for some reason, Conservatives are now reluctant to talk about it. Take that away, and you’re left with what? High taxes and a crumbling public realm. For months now, the most damning criticism of the state of the country at Prime Minister’s Questions has come from the Tory benches, as MPs complain that their constituents can’t see dentists or doctors. Not even Conservative MPs think that life is good under the Conservatives.

So I’m happy for the party to be crushed. I don’t go quite as far as the 46 per cent of the public who say Conservatives deserve to lose every seat, but I could live with that result far more easily than the party holding 250 seats. 

I want the Conservative Party from 2015 to 2024 to be a cautionary tale that politics professors whisper to terrify their students. Because if you can govern this badly, behave this badly, without any consequences, that would bode very ill indeed for our democracy.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Tomiwa Owolade

Published: May 13, 2024

Zadie Smith seems like the poster girl for progressive ideology. She is mixed-race. She was born and raised in London. The characters in her fiction are ethnically and religiously diverse. She hates Brexit. She is deeply worried about climate change. She thinks a ceasefire in Gaza is necessary and has condemned Binyamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government. Tick, tick, tick.

Smith published an essay in The New Yorker last week in which she praised the “brave students” in Columbia University and elsewhere who demand that Israel should end its military attacks on Gaza. She argued that to “send the police in to arrest young people peacefully insisting upon a ceasefire represents a moral injury to us all. To do it with violence is a scandal. How could they do less than protest, in this moment?”

She argues that just as “there was no way to ‘win’ in Vietnam” in the 1960s, Hamas will not be “eliminated” today. That a ceasefire is not just politically wise, it is also an “ethical necessity”.

This did nothing to stop many people on Twitter/X from denouncing Smith as an apologist for Israel. This is because she also argued in her essay that words like “Zionist” should not be treated as a “monolith”. That Jewish students should not be made to feel unsafe on university campuses. And that the conflict can’t be reduced to rhetoric and buzzwords: it is too grave and complex for that.

Smith was castigated for ignorant fence-sitting, for undermining the cause of justice, for being a stooge of the establishment. We have lost Zadie, some of them moaned, as though she belonged to their tribe and has now run away. Others proclaimed that she has always been a liberal, not a progressive, as if this constitutes a definitive mark against her. But the most striking responses were from those who argued that Smith had betrayed her racial identity.

“I am not quite sure why people are shocked,” one account said about Smith’s article. “This is the price of admission into elite white literary and institutional circles.” (The person who posted this, Priyamvada Gopal, is a professor of postcolonial studies at that famously marginalised institution the University of Cambridge.)

Another individual, mentioning Smith along with the head teacher Katharine Birbalsingh and the novelist Bernardine Evaristo, affirmed “there is a very specific reason why the British establishment selects these women”. The “establishment will never select anyone who will quake the foundation”.

Smith’s liberal politics — with her novelistic taste for nuance — thus renders her unfit to be at the vanguard of progressive politics. Someone of her race, it is implied, should know better.

But no one should be a poster girl or boy for left-wing ideology, or any other kind of politics, simply on the basis of their racial identity. The prime minister is an Asian man and leader of the Conservative Party. The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, is an Asian man who represents the Labour Party. Until very recently, the first minister of Scotland was an Asian man who led the Scottish National Party. None of these men are any more or any less Asian than the other.

The majority of ethnic minority people in Britain support the Labour Party but before Jeremy Hunt the last four chancellors of the exchequer were called Kwasi, Nadhim, Rishi and Sajid. The favourite to be the next leader of the Tory party was born Kemi Adegoke and spent most of her childhood in Nigeria.

Diversity and progressivism are not the same thing. London is one of the most diverse cities in the UK but it is also one of the most socially conservative: polling for the Christian think tank Theos found that 29 per cent of Londoners, for instance, believe that same-sex relationships are wrong in some cases; only 23 per cent in the rest of the country think the same. London is conservative because of its diversity, not in spite of it.

Rather than being progressive and secular, many ethnic minority people in the UK are more socially conservative and religious than the rest of the population. This is true elsewhere: 92 per cent of black Americans who voted in the 2020 presidential election supported Joe Biden. But this does not mean that black Democrats constitute the most left-wing base within the party. They are on the right of the Democratic Party, not the left.

The overwhelming majority of black Americans support the Democrats but Donald Trump increased his vote share among black Americans between 2016 and 2020, particularly among younger and male black voters. These trends are holding up for the election this year.

Inferring political opinions exclusively from someone’s background is an abdication of curiosity. Anyone who cares about diversity ought also to care about pluralism: the principle that people who share a cultural background can nevertheless differ in their beliefs.

We should never assume that someone is, or ought to be, progressive by virtue of their race. Some black and brown people are progressive. Others are liberal or conservative. Some are ideologically indifferent. Others shift from one position to another. But this is not because of their race. It is because of their personality, their upbringing, their interests: that irreducible quality inherent in all of us that should never be forsaken for a narrow fixation on group identity.

Eldridge Cleaver was a spokesman for the Black Panthers in the 1960s. He called for a militant revolution and described Ronald Reagan (at that time the governor of California) as a pig. By the 1980s Cleaver was a Mormon and endorsed Reagan to be president of the United States — a fascinating narrative arc worthy of exploration by a novelist as finely attuned to the ironies and complexities of life as Zadie Smith.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

The Nova Scotia government's bill to speed up the licensing process for health-care professionals and make it easier to expand their scope of practice passed without amendments on Thursday.

But opposition members say they hope the Tories will make sure the regulations behind the new law will ensure unfit doctors are not given licences here.

The government says it's a way to get more health-care practitioners working in the province sooner without having to bring in new legislation each time a change needs to be made.

Regulators for professional health-care fields in the province said they supported the spirit of the bill but raised concerns about the way the bill was written, noting it included language that could force them to license an applicant who has disciplinary issues or even a criminal record in another jurisdiction. [...]

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

[houndsofbalthazar]

It's politicsposting hours here on hounds dot com. Minor scandal as Rishi Sunak (current uk prime minister) released a video on social media in which he is in a moving car with no seatbelt. This is illegal and carries a fine of up to £500. Will he be fined? Almost certainly not. Does this on its own make him unfit for office? I mean, sort of. He's the head of government and is publicly breaking the law. It's things like this and the covid lockdown parties that really make me despise the tories. It's this idea that they get to mske the rules but rules shouldn't apply to them.

It's by no means the biggest news or worst thing the government has done this week but fuck me don't post a video of you performing an illegal act to twitter if you are literally in charge of making the law.

[the-real-zhora-salome]

Rishi Sunak’s big speech on reforming disability benefits was intended to show that the government had a grip on the economic and health challenges of the UK’s rising levels of long-term sickness. Instead, it came over as an administration running out of ideas, high on strident rhetoric, and desperate to cut welfare bills at all costs.

It was a “moral mission”, Sunak declared, to overhaul the current welfare system, which was “unfit for purpose”. Disability benefits were too easy to cheat, too cushy, too easily claimed. The speech was a clear appeal to the notion, in vogue on the right, that “mental health culture” has “gone too far”.

“Sicknote culture” – the idea that millions of lazy Britons are taking sickies with the connivance of GPs – was also in his sights, although there was little evidence to backup his assertion, or explanation as to how the changes would work. The underlying message was clear: claimants are lazy and the system too generous.

The most significant announcement was the proposed redesign of the main disability benefit personal independence payment (Pip). Ministers are convinced that far too many people – especially those with mental illness – are able to claim Pip, a non-means-tested payment designed to help claimants with the extra costs of daily living.

It is likely to focus on narrowing eligibility to drive down the Pip bill so that fewer awards are made, and at lower rates. Sceptics will point out that his was tried a decade ago, when Pip was introduced in place of disability living allowance. That reform – at the time brutally controversial, and incompetently managed – has clearly failed, even on its own terms.

Sunak sugared the pill of cuts with pious platitudes. He was “giving back hope” to people who had lost all “dignity and meaning” when they became entrapped in the vortex of the welfare state, he said. It was a familiar Tory tune – the idea that millions of people are not so much ill as spiritually lost.

Sunak floated other under-explained ideas: long-term unemployed claimants who refuse to take any job offered to them would have their benefits withdrawn; mentally ill claimants would be offered medical treatment as an alternative to cash benefits. But these felt like fodder for culture warfare rather than serious proposals.

The reaction was fierce. The disability charity Scope called it a “full-on assault on disabled people”. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation described the speech as “an irresponsible war of words on people who already aren’t getting enough support”. The Resolution Foundation said it was “a problem statement, not a plan”.

Labour’s acting shadow welfare minister, Alison McGovern, promised to reduce NHS waiting lists, reform social security and make work pay, but she was not clear precisely how Labour would do this. What is certain is that the challenge of long-term sickness – and the impact on the labour market – will be a priority for the next government.

A Labour government would need to balance restraining the benefits bill while addressing wider reasons behind mental illness such as poverty, insecure work, ineffectual job support and inadequate NHS care. It does not help – as the IFS said – that no one can yet fully explain what is driving the recent explosion in the takeup of health and disability benefits.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) estimates that one in 10 working-age Britons are receiving health-related benefits, and this is expected to increase. New monthly claims have doubled since the pandemic, especially among young people: a 20-year-old today is about as likely to claim a health-related benefit as a 39-year-old was in 2019.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sunak here with crystal clear fascist rethoric.

But I have to say this here

It does not help – as the IFS said – that no one can yet fully explain what is driving the recent explosion in the takeup of health and disability benefits.

is a remarkably dumb thing to say by the IFS, and even worse is the Guardian just repeating it.

The reason starts with C and ends with -ovid. Jesus Christ on a cracker.

[collymore]

Floreat Etona! Who but your arrogant, pecuniary selves Eton could have been this self-servingly blunt?

By Stanley Collymore   Money is the root of all evil it’s readily acknowledged and, with help of Satan: the master craftsman of evil and pecuniary greed you sure as hell have successfully, made it Eton! Personally I naturally don’t think that any, perspective applicants to Eton College, need to answer your published questions, Daily Mail seeing they simply require essentially to just have parents or guardians with huge wallets and discernibly their own trust funds to get into Eton, actually   because, all educational merit and intellectual ability are just brazenly propaganda facades where this institution actually is concerned and reality don’t count or actually matter. And, if one effectively really needs an irrefutable indication truly of this, just take a close look then, at the quite intellectual paucity of all the undeniably so Eton educated Tory MPs, their Government ministers; and, significantly so, recent   British Prime Ministers - so notoriously on that hapless list David Cameron and too predictably, Boris Johnson. All this attendant with the very offensive to those who can think for themselves and actually do, overly proselytizing, outright lying, coupled with this blatant deceptive exaggeration of Eton’s very often trumpeted, so supposedly unquestionable and really, infallible superiority, actually over all the secondary active educational institutions not just in England but equally too, literally the entirety of the United Kingdom. A construed delusion, as characteristically attached to this indefatigable intention to retain this clearly   fantasy state of their own, as is aptly assisted, in this quite brazenly scurrilous fiction by not truly objectively and also fairly subjected, to genuinely impartial scrutiny but simply clearly relying heavily on the bigoted, and quite obviously subjective plaudits from the UK’s evidently quite wealthy and basically too, privileged themselves quite hierarchal and also unprincipled elites. While in addition to this the rather evidently cronyism and nepotism installed, and most effectively, crucially so to this decision quite unfit for purpose quangos like Ofsted: whose official task - a snow flake in hell's chance of that ever happening in Classism entrenched Britain - is to evidently, routinely impartially, and generally professionally monitor, secondary education in Britain, has basically instead, so egregiously, callously, and quite intentionally, pecuniary so most manifestly, undoubtedly self-servingly turned their gongs and titles awaiting, blind eyes to what most horrendously, clearly pathetically and even criminally is essentially, actually going on. (C) Stanley V. Collymore 21 March 2023. Author's Remarks: In normal circumstances as my regular readers know I do write my remarks at the end of each respective work I’ve embarked on and produced, and would have done so with this poem as well but chose not to. However, my intensive research, past, present and ongoing, as well as my full knowledge of the UK’s educational and academic system being previously a part of both before I voluntarily and most pleasurably quit; intellectually and happily in the process escaping to Germany in 1980 to carry on my academic career there, well aware that the UK’s educational system, and most especially so throughout England was then, as it still is, quite unfit for purpose. So I realized that my remarks  on this Eton poem would unintentionally on my part become with the amount of information I have in my possession very much like a dissertation, and so I decided to give it the thumbs down. Basically so, because my evidently, intellectually acumen blessed readers would know what a dissertation is and I didn’t want to appear patronizing to them, while on the other hand the intellectually challenged lowlife of all classes across the UK, as well as their kin in the genocidally acquired and now absolutely controlled by them countries like delusional Terra nullius Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States of America and who toxically as well infest these places, I similarly didn’t want to waste my time explaining this surfeit of haters, racists and right-wingers, hard-pressed on being able to spell dissertation would undoubtedly have had far more difficulty ascertaining what a dissertation actually was. So I thoroughly dropped the idea of including my normal “Author’s Remarks” segment. Anyway, as they say, in the Kingdom of the Blind the one-eyed person stands an excellent chance of being monarch; and Eton, their likeminded, pecuniary private school ilk and the so-called Oxbridge set up that readily facilitates them are conjointly that one-eyed person. Since, just like the metropolitan Police, Eton et al, and likewise Oxbridge have succumbed to a typical scenario where incompetency at the top and over many years have literally destroyed them; as it’s not what you sensibly, objectively and intelligently know but most essentially and very exclusively who you know now. Hence all the parents and guardians with their huge wallets and their trust fund sprogs that effectively gets you to the top!

[labourites]

[bottlesandbarricades]

This budget reversal is fucking bonkers. This government has done nothing, but flip flop from day one and now whether we get the help we need with energy bills is uncertain.

Liz Truss is unfit to govern. The Tories are unfit to govern. I am not being dramatic when I say this will cost actual lives. We cannot carry on with unelected cunts implementing policies we didn't vote for.

We need a fucking general election and we need it now.

[capnsoapy]

it would be hilarious if it wasn't so tragic how incompetent the tory party are right now. scraping the barrel with this. terfs are unfit to govern

[lost-carcosa]

[mariacallous]

A landmark study has uncovered corruption “red flags” in government Covid contracts worth more than £15bn – representing nearly one in every three pounds awarded by the Conservative administration during the pandemic.

The analysis, billed as the most in-depth look yet at public procurement during the crisis, warns that systemic bias, opaque accounting and uncontrolled pricing resulted in vast waste of public funds on testing and personal protective equipment (PPE).

The review of more than 5,000 contracts across 400 public bodies identifies 135 high-risk contracts with a value of £15.3bn where investigation is merited due to the identification of three or more corruption red flags, which include a lack of competition, delays or failure to release information on procurement, and conflicts of interest in the award of contracts. The report by Transparency International UK finds:

At least 28 contracts, worth £4.1bn, went to those with known political connections to the Conservative party. This amounts to almost a tenth of the money spent on the pandemic response.

Fifty-one contracts, worth £4bn, went through the “VIP lane”, a vehicle through which certain suppliers were given priority, of which 24, worth £1.7bn, were referred by politicians from the Conservative party or their offices.

£1bnwas spent on personal protective equipment from 25 VIP-lane suppliers that was later deemed unfit for use. The VIP lane was found to unlawful by a high court judge in a 2022 ruling.

Eight contracts, worth £500m, went to suppliers that were no more than 100 days old.

The UK government awarded more than £30.7bn in high- value contracts without competition – equivalent to almost two-thirds of all Covid contracts by value.

The Department of Health and Social Care wrote off £14.9bn in public money over a two-year period – equivalent to the government’s total spend on personal protective equipment.

In response, a spokesperson for the Conservative party pointed to a National Audit Office report that found that ministers had properly declared their interests.

“Government policy was in no way influenced by the donations the party received – they are entirely separate,” he said.

The Labour chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has said she will appoint a Covid corruption commissioner to examine an estimated £7.6bn worth of Covid-related fraud, with particular focus on the billions wasted on useless PPE.

The National Crime Agency (NCA) is investigating PPE Medpro – a company led by Douglas Barrowman, husband of the Conservative peer Michelle Mone – which was awarded government contracts worth more than £200m. Barrowman and Lady Mone deny any wrongdoing.

But researchers warn of a potential higher cost to the public purse than that acknowledged by Reeves as a result of the previous administration’s widespread and “often unjustifiable” suspension of procurement checks and safeguards.

Of the £1tn-worth of contracts signed in the three years from February 2020, government data shows that £48.1bn was spent in relation to the pandemic, largely on Covid testing and PPE, and a third (32%) of that spending raised serious concerns.

The report, entitled Behind the Masks, acknowledges that there had been a need to act quickly as Covid took grip, but the authors claim there was an unjustifiable disregard for publishing the details of contracts and an unhealthy reliance in government on uncompetitive procurement even as the impact of the crisis on the health system subsided.

Almost two-thirds of all high-value Covid contracts by value lacked competition. A year into the pandemic, UK contracting authorities were still frequently making awards without competition even as countries in the EU such as Italy were reverting to competitive bidding.

It is claimed that the so-called VIP and high-priority lanes – which triaged offers of assistance that came via officials, MPs, members of the Lords and ministerial offices – enabled unqualified politicians to fast-track the reviewing of offers from PPE and testing suppliers – a practice said to be unique to the UK’s pandemic response.

About 2% of all offers – about 500 – went through the VIP lane. Of these, 51 suppliers were successful, representing a 10% success rate, compared with the 0.7% rate on other routes, while the prices paid were on average 80% higher.

The report estimates that Covid contracts boosted some suppliers’ profit margins by as much as 40%.

Of the 135 contracts identified as being high risk, the report’s authors write: “The most common red flags were delayed publication of contracts and those awarded uncompetitively. However, most of these contracts exhibited red flags across multiple areas of risk – including those associated with the supplier profile, the procurement process and the contract outcomes – and often spanning all three. Some contracts displayed as many as eight red flags.”

A Treasury spokesperson said: “The chancellor has been clear that she will not tolerate waste and will appoint a Covid Corruption Commissioner to get back the money that is owed to the British people.

“The commissioner will report directly to the chancellor, working with the secretary of state for health and social care, and their report will be presented to parliament for all members to see.”

The findings have been published on the day that public hearings examining the impact of the pandemic on the healthcare system are due to start. Transparency International UK, as part of the UK Anti-Corruption Coalition, has core participant status in the proceedings.

Joe Powell, a Labour MP and the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on anti-corruption and responsible tax, said: “The scale of money lost to the taxpayer is staggering. Amid a cost of living crisis, it is simply unacceptable that so much money could have been lost to cronyism and human error. Public money must be accountable.

Daniel Bruce, the chief executive of Transparency International UK, said there had been a collapse in the normal checks and balances, and that a slew of changes in procurement was necessary to rebuild confidence in the system.

He said: “The scale of corruption risk in the former government’s approach to spending public money during the years of the Covid pandemic was profound.

“That we find multiple red flags in more than £15bn of contacts – amounting to a third of all such spending – points to more than coincidence or incompetence.

“The Covid procurement response was marked by various points of systemic weakness and political choices that allowed cronyism to thrive, all enabled by woefully inadequate public transparency. As far as we can ascertain, no other country used a system like the UK’s VIP lane in their Covid response.”

[amaximumtastemakercollection]

After the Croyden scandal, in which a London tower block was found to be unfit for human habitation, it’s about time that we question government allocation of funds to local authorities.  The Tories hand out less money to local councils each year, and then have the nerve to criticise that council when they don’t have the money to complete vital repairs and refurbishments.  

[uk-news-talking-politics]

Anti-protest bill: Freedom dies in silence

By Ian Dunt

The truly frightening thing was that they didn't even argue for it. Over two days of debate and dozens of speeches, not one government minister actually defended the anti-protest powers in the new policing bill. Only one MP did.

These are the most draconian restrictions we have seen on protests for decades, but those defending them on the government benches would not even mention them.  They simply pretended they did not exist. And then they passed them for second reading, by 359 votes to 263.

The bill gives police the power to impose severe restrictions on protests if they suspect they "may result in serious disruption to the activities of an organisation" or could cause "serious unease, alarm or distress" to a passer-by. This applies to every single protest outside parliament and indeed to any protest anywhere. There has never been a protest which you could prove would not alarm someone. They make noise. That is what they do. The bill puts the power as to whether a protest can be held entirely in the hands of the police.

And yet even this benchmark was considered too high. So the bill also gave the home secretary the power to change the legal meaning of the term "serious disruption" by statutory instrument - effectively sidestepping parliament. In future, if Priti Patel or one of her successors decides that a protest was legal but they still wanted rid of it, they could simply unilaterally change the law.

Yesterday afternoon, when Patel opened up the debate, she said it would give "police the power to take a more proactive approach" but that the "threshold at which police can impose restrictions on the use of noise at a protest is rightfully high". It's not high at all, of course. It is so low it includes every protest one can imagine.

We didn't know it yet, but that would be the only time anyone on the government benches defending the measures made any reference to them at all.

Several Tory MPs stood up to say that the concerns about the right to protest were exaggerated. But they never once referred to the powers over noise. Instead, they read out a list of arguments handed to them by the party, saying that the new provisions were needed to tackle excessively disruptive protests. These examples included an ambulance that couldn't get to a hospital, the Extinction Rebellion sabotage of a printing press and people handcuffing themselves to public transport.

But of course, these kinds of actions were already against the law. That's why the people who did them were arrested. In fact, they were against the exact law which the current bill aimed to amend: the Public Order Act 1986. None of them were about noise. None of them were about the home secretary having the power to unilaterally rewrite legislation. None of them were remotely pertinent to the powers contained in the bill.

It's astonishing that only two Tory MPs spoke out in detail about the provisions. One was Fiona Bruce, who said they would "significantly lower the legal test for the police to issue conditions on protest".

The other - remarkably - was Theresa May, who had acted as a hardliner when she served as home secretary. But even she was taken aback by what was being proposed here. "It's tempting when home secretary," she said to Patel from the benches above her, "to think that giving powers to the home secretary is very reasonable, because we all think we're reasonable. But actually future home secretaries may not be so reasonable." It was a mark of how far the country has fallen that May is now the voice of liberal conscience on the government benches.

Only one other Tory MP made any reference to the noise provisions. It was David Amess, who spoke out in favour of them. "My office looks onto Parliament Square and I have long complained about the endless demonstrations that take place," he said. "It is very difficult to work because of the noise, with drums, horns and loudspeakers. Parliament being the seat of democracy, our work should not be disrupted."

He is evidently an out-and-out authoritarian who wants to end all protests in Parliament Square and therefore completely unfit for living in a free society. But at very least he had the courage to state these legislative measures for what they were. He was an honest authoritarian, and in the context of this debate that was evidently the most we could hope for: someone who would admit what they were doing.

Over the last year, we have heard a great deal from Conservative MPs on civil liberties and free speech. They have railed against the lockdown provisions to handle the pandemic. They have warned of a cancel culture in university campuses and demanded intervention by the state to prohibit it. They have said that conservative voices are not allowed on broadcast studios because of a woke takeover.

And now, here, the silencing had finally begun. Protestors were being told that they could not raise their voice. It was as clear-cut an attack on free speech as you could possibly imagine. But to that, they had nothing to say. The great champions of liberty did not even offer a murmur of criticism. Philip Davies, David Davies, Steve Baker: not a whisper of dissent. In fact, Baker stood up at the end to say that Labour was "refusing to engage" with "legitimate limits on freedoms".

We've been here before, of course. During the New Labour period, some truly disturbing attacks were made on civil liberties and free speech. But back then, ministers at least had the decency to argue for them. Some of those arguments were terrible. But they at least had the basic decency to offer them.

Today, the government did not even try to justify what it was doing. Tory MPs barely pretended to have read the bill, let alone understand its contents, let alone challenge them. The great champions of English liberties didn't say a word.

It was a silence. A silence as deep and wide and profound as that which they intend to impose on protestors. And that was the most frightening thing of all.

[ingek73]

‘Right at the beginning of the pandemic, there was intense concern among officials about the health of one elderly female. I was subsequently told by a very senior figure that there was “a lot of worry” the Queen could be killed by Covid, with incalculable effects on public morale and trust in government. The public would ask, so shivered Whitehall, how anyone could be safe if they could not even protect the head of state? This fear was reasonable. We were not far into the crisis before Prince Charles got Covid.

While elaborate precautions were put in motion to safeguard the Queen, someone in government did not get the memo. Or he did receive the memo, but couldn’t be arsed to read it. In mid-March of last year, when staff at Number 10 were already falling ill as the virus rampaged around that rabbit-warren building, Boris Johnson told aides that he was going to carry on with his weekly in-person audience with the Queen. He answered protests that this was sensationally reckless by responding: “That’s what I do every Wednesday. Sod this, I’m gonna go and see her.” On the retelling of Dominic Cummings, he had to explain why going to see the Queen was “completely insane” and asked what the prime minister would do if he caused her death. Only then did Mr Johnson finally relent. “He basically just hadn’t thought it through.”

“The day the prime minister threatened to bump off the Queen” is a pretty remarkable story and yet it has not generated headlines as large as might be expected. Perhaps this is because people’s capacity to process information about his bonkers behaviour has reached its saturation point. It may also be because this revelation came in a BBC interview with Mr Cummings, whose testimony is discounted by some or dismissed altogether by others as the bitter effusions of an ex-aide on a revenge quest against a man he describes as “ludicrously” unfit to be prime minister.’

[mostlysignssomeportents]

US pharma and biotech lobbyists' documents reveal their plan to gouge Britons in any post-Brexit trade-deal

Both Phrma (the lobby for the global pharmaceutical industry) and Biotechnology Innovation Organization (biotech lobbyists) provided letters to a US-UK government meeting to discuss post-Brexit trade terms, in which both organisations called for substantially higher British prices for essential medicines after Brexit.

They joined a chorous of lobbyists from other US industries (pork, grains, etc) to sell products to the UK that are currently considered unfit for purpose, such as pork raised with high levels of antibiotics or grains treated with dangerous pesticides.

In three days, Britons will go to the polls to elect a new government. Boris Johnson's Tories have called for a "hard Brexit" with no ongoing special relationship with the EU, which will leave the UK in desperate need of trade with the USA, and thus vulnerable to industry demands to make trade deals that tie the British government's hands on safety and health.

I am a member of the Labour Party and a donor to Jeremy Corbyn's campaign.

https://boingboing.net/2019/12/09/tories-kill.html