Tom Watson is making sense here; perhaps that is his biggest handicap.

Let’s face it: Since returning to office in 2010, the last thing to concern the Conservative Party has been making any kind of sense at all!

We’ve had ideological display after ideological display, doing nothing for the good of the nation and much for the interests of a very few, very rich, Conservative Party donors.

Yet somehow, enough of the voting public have seen fit to continue supporting the Conservatives in their crazy, ill-conceived and short-sighted schemes.

If you know any of these people, please ask them why they are so keen to divest themselves – and the rest of us – of all the freedoms that we have managed to gain over the last two or three hundred years.

Some of us really want to know their reasons.

Since returning to power as a majority government, free of the Liberal Democrats, the Conservatives have introduced a battery of measures to weaken the opposition and to limit accountability: the freedom of information act review, the planned reduction in the House of Lords’ powers, the 19 per cent cut in public funding for opposition parties and the trade union bill.

In a speech [this] morning, Tom Watson, Labour’s most vigorous champion of civil liberties, [was set to] take aim at this agenda. He [was to] call on the Tories to abandon their FoI review, describing it as “a particularly egregious example of their determination to reverse the transparency Labour introduced.”

“It doesn’t have the support of the public,” he [was expected to] say, “it is opposed by many of the organisations that are covered by FoI; it has been condemned by the Information Commissioner and slammed by a former head of the civil service. It’s a waste of taxpayers money and it’s time it was scrapped. The Freedom of Information Act works well. Labour would strengthen and extend it.”

Watson [was set to] highlight the disparity between the Tories’ actions and their past words in opposition and coalition.

Source: Tom Watson bids to reclaim personal liberty for the left

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