Dictator Johnson: like all fascists, the only rights that interest Boris Johnson are his own – which is why he has announced he intends to abolish yours – and stop the courts from ruling that anything he does is illegal.
The last week in UK politics was seismic – in terms of the changes it announced.
Boris Johnson is using the Tories huge Parliamentary majority to change our way of life, fundamentally.
Here’s what they have started. But what can you do about it?
1. The Conservatives are ending your right to protest.
And they announced it at precisely the wrong moment. After a vigil for a woman who had been kidnapped and murdered – allegedly by a policeman – turned into a riot when policemen started attacking the female participants, Home Secretary Priti Patel introduced a new law that allows police to arrest anybody for making a demonstration that is noticed by anybody else.
There’s no point in protesting if you’re not allowed to make enough noise for other people to notice it, of course.
The move has been interpreted – correctly – as an attempt to head off protests against the Conservatives’ planned political changes that will alter the UK from democracy (albeit a not-very-progressive one) into a full-blown dictatorship.
2. The Tories are giving the police huge new powers of oppression
The example I used was the new power to arrest travellers – not for committing a crime, but on suspicion that they might do so in the future. This comes with a power to confiscate their homes.
Priti Patel’s Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill is full of similar increases of oppression, against people in all parts of the UK’s society, we’re told.
3. The Conservatives are continuing to turn a blind eye to crimes against women – especially if they are committed by the police
Hate crime is the trademark of Conservative governments in the UK since 2010. They have stirred up hatred against migrant workers; they’ve stirred it up against people with long-term illnesses and disabilities. Their new Police Bill will stir up more hate against minorities, while failing to protect more than half the population from crime.
The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill sets the penalty for attacking a statue at 10 years imprisonment. That is twice as long a term as the starting-point sentence for rape.
We discovered this in the same week that a serving police officer walked free from a court after admitting assaulting a woman who was just walking home at night, using his police training to try to wrestle her to the ground while flinging misogynistic verbal abuse at her. His colleagues had tried to ignore her complaint when she first filed it.
Oh, and after we were told the Metropolitan Police had learned its lessons from an incident when two of its officers published WhatsApp posts of them posing with the dead bodies of two murdered women, another Met officer was alleged to have sent a “vile” post about Sarah Everard, while guarding her body.
4. The Conservative government thinks giving £2.6 million to a firm based in a country that is hostile to the UK – for communications equipment (think about it) – is money better-spent than giving nurse’s an above-inflation pay rise in reward for their work against Covid-19.
5. The Tories are hoping to strike trade deals with nations across the word that violate the human rights of their citizens.
Like is attracted to like, it seems; the Tory government is ripping up the human rights of UK citizens.
6. The Conservatives have announced that they will spend billions of pounds adding 65 warheads to the UK’s arsenal of nuclear weapons.
The UK does not have the facilities needed to fire all of these missiles and in any case it would be madness to do so, as it would certainly lead to the destruction of the entire nation in a retaliatory nuclear inferno.
7. The Conservatives have announced an attack on democracy with a plan to change the voting system at local elections to favour them.
They are using the result of a 2011 referendum – about a different subject – to justify changing the system by which Combined Authority mayors, the mayor of London and police and crime commissioners are elected from a form of proportional representation by which those elected must be supported by more than half of the electorate to the old FPTP (First Past The Post) system by which the candidate with the most votes wins, even if supported by a tiny minority of the electorate.
8. The Tories are following through on their threat to end the separation of powers that prevents the UK from falling into dictatorship, by curbing the courts’ ability to rule government actions illegal.
Boris Johnson was caught breaking the law over Brexit and the prorogation of Parliament in 2019 – when he actually misled the Queen in order to get her to end a Parliamentary session early – and he’s butt-hurt about it.
As a result, he intends to ensure that the courts will not be able to stop him from doing anything he likes in the future – no matter how many laws he breaks.
These are just the highlights – of which the worst must be Boris Johnson’s plan to put himself and his government above the law while subjecting the rest of us to increasing oppression.
The big question now is: what are you going to do about it?
We know that a quarter of the UK’s population is 100 per cent behind Johnson because they voted for him and his party – right? Granted, a small number of them might be wavering now because of the extremism of the changes listed above – and remember, they are only events that happened last week – but there remains a significant rump of Tory support.
About a third of those who are left are children who are too young to have their opinions taken seriously by the political elite.
That leaves around half the UK’s population to stand up for democracy.
But the question remains: How do you protect your freedoms when your right to do so is being taken away?
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