Category Archives: Dictatorship

Is Rishi Sunak saying if he becomes PM, he will jail you for criticising him?

Sunak: if he replaces the man directly behind him on the left, he’ll sink the UK into a mire of extremist fascism – while pretending he’s fighting extremism.

He says he won’t target people who criticise his extremist government with this new plan.

But who would be stupid enough to believe him?

I refer, of course, to Rishi Sunak, who has said those who speak extreme hatred toward the UK will be treated as extremists and referred to the government’s deradicalisation programme Prevent, if he becomes prime minister:

People who display hatred through speech or writing would be referred to Prevent programme, Mr Sunak pledged.

The former Chancellor’s team clarified that the changes would not include criticism of the government or any government policy, and was not legally binding.

Extremism is defined in the 2011 Prevent strategy as “vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs”, as well as calls for the death of armed forces personnel.

Sunak’s team vowed to broaden that out to include “vilification of the UK” to ensure “those with an extreme hatred of our country that leads them to pose a risk to national security can be identified and diverted away from a destructive path”.

Sharp minds have already taken a look at that idea – and found it wanting:

So in fact, it seems Sunak is planning to breed far-right political extremism in the UK by targeting – as extremists – people who disagree with his plan for far-right Tory government.

He’ll use it to Prevent (capital letter intended) people from demanding independence for Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

And he’ll use it to steamroller opposition to the imminent bonfire of your human and working rights.

And that’s probably just for starters.

If you’re not up in arms about this, you’re asleep and need to wake up.

Some are happy to protest passively:

Others are making the point more forcefully – that this is yet another example of the fascism that has underscored Tory politics for more than a decade now:

This Site has been calling the Conservative government out over its fascism for years – and been vilified for it.

Are you all ready to accept, now, that I might have a point?

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Patel strikes again: asylum seekers to be deported to African dictatorship

Justifying the unacceptable: as always, Priti Patel has shown herself to be callous, immoral and possibly homicidal.

Priti Patel has announced a “cruel and inhumane” deal to transport asylum seekers crossing the English Channel to Rwanda – a country where her own government has expressed concern about “extrajudicial killings, deaths in custody, enforced disappearances and torture”.

Patel praised the record of the east African country on human rights. It was the site of the genocide of 800,000 people, exactly 28 years ago in 1994, in which members of the minority Tutsi group were murdered by the majority Hutus.

The genocide was carried out with shocking efficiency. Lists of Hutu government opponents were handed out to militias who killed them, along with all of their families. ID cards bored details of people’s ethnic group, so militias set up roadblocks where Tutsis were slaughtered. Thousands of Tutsi women were forced to become sex slaves.

The slaughter ended after 100 days, when the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front when a military victory against the Hutu government. The country is currently a dictatorship run by the RPF.

Critics of current president Paul Kagame have been murdered – or suffered assassination attempts – and concerns have been raised about the conviction on terrorism charges of Paul Rusesabagina, subject of Hollywood film Hotel Rwanda about his role saving more than 1,000 people during the genocide.

Only last year, the UK government – of which Priti Patel is Home Secretary – expressed serious concerns to the United Nations over “continued restrictions to civil and political rights and media freedom” in Rwanda, and called for independent investigations into those “allegations of extrajudicial killings, deaths in custody, enforced disappearances and torture”.

And now Patel wants to send vulnerable refugees, who may have been victims of atrocity and torture, to this country. Perhaps she considers Rwanda’s record to be mild in comparison with her own views on what should happen to asylum-seekers.

It is – and always has been – a bizarre pose from the daughter of economic migrants from Uganda (originally of Indian origin). If she thinks the current wave of asylum seekers should not be allowed to stay in the UK, why haven’t she and all her family packed themselves off back to Uganda?

And is this really about solving the UK’s illegal immigration problem – or about saving ‘Big Dog’ Boris Johnson’s bacon?

He has been named by the Metropolitan Police as a criminal for attending illegal parties in Downing Street during Covid-19 lockdown.

According to the Telegraph, he’s facing a second fine over former communication chief Lee Cain’s leaving party, where he is understood to have made a speech and remained in attendance for a considerable amount of time.

The knock-on effect is that he has lied to Parliament – an offence for which there is only one penalty: He must resign as prime minister.

But the overprivileged, entitled criminal and liar doesn’t want to go, so it seems he is looking for a way to distract us from his crimes.

So suddenly he’s on our TV’s appealing to NIMBYs (people who say Not In My Back Yard to particular events or plans) across the UK to support what he called a “shared humanitarian impulse” with a nation whose human rights record is, let’s be honest – terrifying.

This Writer hopes it’s a grave miscalculation.

People don’t want to be overcome by waves of refugees seeking to settle in the UK in response to the foreign adventures of Tory (and other) governments who have merrily bombed their own countries into rubble, but there is an obvious answer to that: stop bombing their countries.

The excuse that asylum seekers are encouraging and enriching people smugglers is a lie. In fact, Johnson’s government – and especially Patel herself – is encouraging people smugglers by closing off all legal routes into the UK.

He says they should only take such legal routes, but that is impossible when they don’t exist!

So I hope the people of the UK see through this transparent attempt to whitewash a dirty, corrupt politician by scapegoating people who only want to be able to live in peace, in a peaceful country.

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Is this the new Tory energy policy – going cap in hand to tyrants?

Begging bowl already loaded: this is actually a stock shot to illustrate Boris Johnson’s junket around the world, trying to chum up with foreign dictators in return for cheap oil. But what does he have to offer in return?

Boris Johnson’s decision to traipse around the world’s dictators with his begging bowl in hand has been mocked harshly by MPs in the UK’s Parliament.

He is currently in Saudi Arabia to sign a business deal with the government there, days after it carried out the largest mass execution of civilians in modern history – 81 people including seven people from neighbouring Yemen, with whom the Saudis are at war.

Called out over it by Labour Deputy Leader Angela Rayner during (Deputy) Prime Minister’s Questions, Dominic Raab had no answer other than a complete non-sequitur about the Salisbury Poisoning of 2018 and former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

He was upbraided by Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle for harking back to the past,

And his claim wasn’t even accurate!

None of his bluster cut any ice with MPs, though – as a subsequent question by Alistair Carmichael showed:

And it struck a jarring contrast with Raab’s own words about the “despotic regime” in Iran that has just released Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe after six years.

After Ms Rayner welcomed the development – and asked for an inquiry to determine whether Johnson’s “lazy words” in 2018 had lengthened her prison term, Raab suggested she should not give “succour” to Iran:

What an odd thing to suggest about a dictatorship that only released her because his government had finally paid a decades-old £400 million debt in order to gain access to that “despotic regime” and its oil!

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Tories set to outlaw the kind of anti-war protests we praised so much in Russia


While you’re busy having your attention directed to Russia and Ukraine by your Tory-supporting right-wing media…

… and I’ll make this quick because it’s really easy to understand…

Remember those anti-war protests in Russia that we all praised last week?

These:

Well, while you were being distracted by the war against which these brave people were protesting, your own government has been busy outlawing the kind of protest they were carrying out.

This is important because we are being told that Russia is a repressive, authoritarian dictatorship. And it is true that protesters can expect to face lengthy prison sentences if they are arrested.

But just compare the jail terms they’ll get with what you’ll face if you protest against your own government after the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill is passed into law:

The debate is in Hansard (although at the time of writing, not in full). You can read it here.

So much for the Tory UK’s freedom-loving democracy!

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The attack on #courts and #democracy was a #Tory #manifesto promise. Didn’t you know?

RIP democracy: this image of Boris Johnson in a Hitler moustache was stuck to the door of the Conservative office in Beverley, near Hull, earlier this year.

This is nothing new:

Funny how The Times has only just learned of the Johnson government’s plan to overrule court rulings, in December 2021, when it was in the Conservative manifesto for the December 2019 general election almost two years ago!

Yes, Boris Johnson backpedalled for a little while, but that’s a classic Tory tactic; they lure you into a false feeling that everything’s going to be all right and then they stab you in the back.

If it’s good enough for them when they’re electing leaders, then they’re not going to see any reason not to do it to you. Right?

It is an offence against democracy and a step into elected dictatorship – but you knew that already because This Site told you.

So did the nearly 14 million people who voted for it. Right?

Wrong?

They didn’t know?

They just voted Tory because they wanted to get out of the European Union so badly they didn’t care what else happened over the next five years?

Oh, wow. And – hey! – The Times could have told them all about it back in 2019 but didn’t?

That’s a real shame.

It’s also the reason people are told, time and time again in their lives, to RTFM.

In this case, it means Read The F-ing Manifesto!

Too late now.

Because this is one manifesto promise that Boris Johnson is hell-bent on keeping.

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Labour bid to gag website raises serious concerns about the party’s leaders

Badge of shame: if you filled a river with badges representing every Labour member expelled under false accusations of anti-Semitism, along with those representing every member who has quit in disgust at Keir Starmer’s dictatorial regime, how many miles would they stretch along it?

An attempt by the Labour Party to gag an investigative website suggests the party is undemocratic and unfit to govern.

It seems Labour’s infamous Governance and Legal unit was upset after The Electronic Intifada reported a decision by two party officials to block a debate on a motion calling for sanctions against Israel, due to the ongoing persecution of Palestinians by that nation’s government and military.

The claim was that it “would undermine the party’s ability to provide a safe and welcoming space” for Jewish members.

This attempt to protect Israel shows that the Labour Party machine is deeply anti-Semitic: it relies on a false equivalence between the decisions of the Israeli government and every Jew on Earth, regardless of their political views.

According to the definition of anti-Semitism that Labour has agreed to support, that is anti-Semitism: all Jews are not to be considered responsible for the behaviour of one group.

Worse still, Labour’s Governance and Legal unit tried to protect the party officials who tried to stop the debate – Hove & Portslade CLP chair Kim Bolton and Labour South East organiser Scott Horner – saying it was neither necessary nor in the public interest for them to be named.

It also claimed that the article had relied on private email exchanges and therefore breached data protection law.

But in fact the article had relied on minutes of a CLP meeting which The Electronic Intifada has now published in its own defence.

It is necessary to know who is spreading this poison in the Labour Party. There is no evidence to support fearmongering about anti-Semitism in the party as a result of a sanction against Israel and the claim that there are now concerns for the officials’ safety is extreme; it seems more likely that this was an attempt to protect them from any backlash within the party’s mechanisms against their inappropriate and undemocratic behaviour.

And this is the final – and most important point – to be made here: the Labour Party is now undemocratic. It does not allow the voice of the members to be heard and does not represent that voice. Instead, it supports the wishes of organisations outside the party.

This means Labour does not represent its own members.

And if it cannot represent its own members, then it should not be allowed to represent the UK as the party of government.

This episode shows that a Labour government – as led by Keir Starmer and following his orders – would not enact policies that are supported by a majority of the UK’s public.

It would act on its own agenda, dictated by groups that do not belong to the party, whose members probably don’t even vote for it.

And that is why nobody should support the Labour Party under Starmer’s leadership. Instead we need to be making lists of members and officials who need to be brought to book, once this vile and shameful era of the party’s history is brought to an end.

Source: Labour Party tries to intimidate The Electronic Intifada | The Electronic Intifada

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Is aid cut a Tory bid to inflict avoidable megadeaths on foreigners?

RIP democracy: Boris Johnson cut aid to foreign countries without offering MPs a chance to vote on it. His claim that the law allows such a move is highly debatable. 

The message This Writer took from MPs’ failure to force a vote on reversing foreign aid cuts is that it means there will be hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths in affected countries.

That was said by Tory Andrew Mitchell, who seems to have come a long way since the “BikeGate” controversy.

And the really offensive part was that the decision to cut foreign aid from 0.7 per cent to 0.5 per cent of National Income (do they mean Gross Domestic Product?) was taken without allowing Parliament to vote on it.

It was an offence against democracy, because Boris Johnson’s Tory government believes in dictatorship instead.

And (obviously) it believes in finding ways to ensure that as many people as possible die.

Ministers have said it is possible to vary the amount spent without changing the 2015 law that makes the target binding.

But the decision to make the change unilaterally means there is no deadline for restoring that target – meaning the government could leave the cut in place indefinitely.

Isn’t there a more important question to be answered, about what’s being done with this aid money?

Isn’t it important that it should be used to ensure that the nations receiving the money need less and less of it in the future?

Has that been happening? How can we check?

There are many questions to be answered about foreign aid and This Writer hopes the debate on Tuesday (June 8) provides some of the answers.

The joy of it is that the Tory government has shot itself in the foot, whatever happens.

It has already garnered bad publicity over this in the week before the UK hosts the G7 summit.

It will receive more bad publicity with the debate.

And Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle has said he wants a substantive vote, which means if Boris Johnson refuses to grant it, he’ll have even more bad publicity.

Source: Foreign aid: Rebel Tories blocked in bid to reverse cuts – BBC News

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It’s 77 years since D-Day. Is a Tory dictatorship really what our brave servicemen died for?

D-Day: these British soldiers laid down their lives in Normandy – and beyond – for freedom. They would be ashamed to learn that their own country is turning into a dictatorship today.

On June 6, 1944, hundreds of thousands of brave British and Irish servicemen stormed the beaches of Normandy in an assault that would eventually end Adolf Hitler’s Nazi dictatorship in Europe.

That was 77 years ago. When they came home, most of the people involved helped elect the Labour government that created the National Health Service, among many other great institutions. And now, most of them have passed away.

I’m going to be controversial now, and suggest that it might be just as well – because if they had lived to see what Boris Johnson and his Conservatives are doing to the nation for which they so proudly fought, it would probably have killed them.

In rough figures, British casualties on D-Day totalled around 2,700. That’s roughly half the number of new Covid-19 cases recorded yesterday because Boris Johnson’s government couldn’t be bothered to take appropriate measures to keep the delta variant out of the UK.

The total number of people who died and were injured in World War II was roughly 451,000. That is fewer than the number who have died due to Conservative policies since that party came into office in 2010.

Here comes the punchline: The men who fought and died on Sword Beach and Gold Beach laid down their lives to bring Hitler and his Nazis to justice.

Boris Johnson and his Tories will never be brought to justice because they are currently legislating to put themselves above the law – forever.

Look at the way Priti Patel locks human beings in concentration camps, where they suffer in appalling conditions that have caused at least one large fire and outbreaks of Covid-19 affecting hundreds.

Look at the hundreds of thousands of sick and disabled people who have died because the Tories denied them the benefit payments they deserved. Aktion T4 killed fewer.

They are imposing a dictatorship on the UK that could become worse than anything Hitler did.

How do you think our servicemen on D-Day would feel if they knew they were fighting for that?

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Tory dictatorship: MPs and Lords say attack on courts will weaken rule of law. But THEY CANNOT STOP IT

Manifesto commitment: the Conservatives made their plan to end democracy clear in their 2019 election manifesto. Every Conservative voter demanded an end to democracy and a slide into dictatorship and there is no way to stop it now.

This will make no difference at all to Boris Johnson’s plans because none of the objectors are Conservatives.

It seems a cross-party group of MPs and peers has written to Justice Secretary Robert Buckland to say government plans to restrict judicial review will weaken the rule of law (and therefore harm justice).

Buckland couldn’t care less, of course. That is what these plans are supposed to do – as some of us have been saying for years.

Judicial reviews examine whether an action or decision of a public body – like the government – follows the law.

Boris Johnson was deeply embarrassed by judicial reviews that overturned his decisions to mismanage Brexit and to prorogue Parliament, back in 2019.

So he made plans to stop the courts from forcing his government to obey the law, and put them into his 2019 election manifesto.

And then every single tribal Tory headbanger in the United Kingdom voted away their right to a law-abiding democracy.

Johnson has couched his plan to end democracy in the UK with (typically) a lie: he said his plan will “restore the balance of power between the executive, legislature and the courts”.

In fact, it will enshrine in law the right of a sitting – Tory – government to do whatever it wants, by making sure the rest of us don’t have any legal power to stop it.

In their letter to Buckland, the 32 Labour, Liberal Democrat, Green, SNP, Plaid Cymru, DUP and Alliance MPs stated

the proposals “would weaken both individuals and the courts, and effectively put government actions beyond the reach of the law.

“Together, these changes would make it much harder for people to put things right when mistakes are made or governments overstep their bounds. They would undermine the rule of law and the crucial principles of fairness and accountability.”

The letter said the proposals are based on a “false claim” (read: lie) by Johnson and his government that a panel led by Lord Faulks QC had found that courts in judicial review cases had become more prone “to edge away from a strictly supervisory jurisdiction”.

Faulks himself has contradicted this Tory lie. He said his panel did not identify any such “trend” and “was not ultimately convinced that judicial review needed radical reform”.

The plan to put the government above the law has been condemned by the  Bar Council, Law Society, Constitutional and Administrative Law Association, Liberty, Justice and the Public Law Project for the same reason.

The Ministry of Justice has stated: “We made a manifesto commitment to ensure the judicial review process is not open to abuse or delay, or used to conduct politics by another means.” Fine words that are not borne out by the substance of the plan.

When we consider the ways the Tories have abused the system during the Covid-19 crisis – bypassing the competitive tendering system to give contracts worth fortunes to their friends, who failed to deliver, meaning tens of thousands of lives were sacrificed for profit, we can predict what this plan will mean.

Every incompetent, corrupt and self-serving decision by Boris Johnson will carry the full force of the law, because there will be no law to stop him.

It will extinguish democracy and force you into a new dark age of dictatorship.

And while this letter of protest is a nice gesture, it is futile.

The decision was made in 2019. There is nothing you can do to stop it.

Source: Plans to restrict judicial review weaken the rule of law, MPs warn | Law | The Guardian

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Here’s what we learned last week about the way the Tories are changing the UK. What can we do about it?

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?

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/mike-sivier-libel-fight/

Vox Political needs your help!
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And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!

If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!

Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
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The Livingstone Presumption is now available
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HWG PrintHWG eBook

Health Warning: Government! is now available
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HWG PrintHWG eBook

The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
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SWAHTprint SWAHTeBook