Happy "Screw the Poor" Day, everyone!

Welcome to Budget Day, or as we've come to know it - the day where the government announce the new and innovative ways they've concoted to ruin lives and run this country into the ground.

In ten months of Tory government, plus five years under the Coalition, we’ve witnessed a comprehensive, ruthless, unrelenting attack on disabled people, low earners, unemployed people, families, elderly people, migrants, hospitals, schools, unions, civil rights, and the very fabric of democracy.

We were told that this was all necessary, and that our country’s fragile economy would be shored up as a result of all these cost-cutting measures. This should go down in history as one of the biggest LIES ever told by a government to its people. 

Here's a handful of truths instead:

Disability

• Over 14,000 disabled people have lost their mobility cars through switching from DLA to PIP
• 18,000 people lost vital assistance when the IndependentLiving Fund was closed last year
• The government used a loophole to reject calls from the House of Lords for an impact assessment before voting through a further £30 aweek cut to Employment Support Allowance (ESA)
• Proposed further cuts to PIP will see 200,000 disabledpeople lose £3000 a year
• The government admits that at least 2000 people have died following Work Capability Assessments, though campaigners say the true figure is much higher.
• WCAs have also been linked to 279,000 new cases of mental health problems, and 725,000 new prescriptions for anti-depressants.
• Disabled people have been hit up to 19 times harder byausterity cuts.
• While demand for mental health services has soared by 20% in the last five years, funding has been cut by 8% in real terms.

Credit: Centre for Welfare Reform

Housing and homelessness:

• The average house price is now over TEN times a person’s income, and in London NINETEEN times the average salary.
• Of the NINE MILLION private renters in the UK, one-third ofprivately rented homes fail to meet the Decent Homes Standard.
• More than 50,000 families are recorded as homeless every year, with over 103,000 children recorded as homeless for Christmas 2015.
• A third of homeless people are made so because of a privatetenancy ending, and being unable to afford to find another home – this figure has trebled under David Cameron, from 11% in 2009.
• The Tories rejected an amendment to the Housing and PlanningBill, which would see landlords required to ensure that homes are fit for habitation.
• The CAB estimates that over 700,000 families are living in privately rented homes that are unfit for habitation, with landlords taking in £5.6bn in rent for those properties.
• Over 15,000 homeless families have been put into emergency B&B accommodation in a different local authority – sometimes an hour and a half’s travelling time away from children’s schools.
• Research by letting agents Your Move and Reeds Rains showed rents in England and Wales had increased by 15% since May 2010, or 3.6% beyond inflation.

Credit: Shelter via ITV

Education and Teaching

• The government has announced that by 2020, all schools willhave converted to academy status.
• Overwhelming evidence has shown that academies are more thantwice as likely to become “inadequate” in Ofsted terms than schools under Local Authority control, and up to TWELVE times as likely to remain “inadequate” rather than improve.
• Teachers report working on average 59 hours a week, only 1/3 of which is spent on teaching. The rest is spent on planning, administration, and management.
• The number of teachers leaving the profession has risen by11% over the past 3 years, and 75% of those leave before retirement.
• Workload came top (61%) in reasons given by teachers who were thinking of leaving the profession in a recent YouGov survey for the National Union of Teachers, closely followed by seeking a better work-life balance (57%).
• 55% of 338 school leaders surveyed by the Association of School and College Leaders have reported a large rise in pupils with anxietyand stress.
• The NSPCC reported that the number of young people in Britain seeking counselling over exam stress has increased by 200% in recentyears.
• In 2013-14 ChildLine said it received more than 34,000approaches from young people over school worries such as revision, workloads, problems with teachers
• The “Prevent” agenda has been branded toxic and criticised for exacerbating Islamophobia, as families report feeling threatened with having their children removed.
• Some Further Education staff have experienced a real-termspay cut of 17% after years of below-inflation rises and pay freezes.
• Spending for adult education has been slashed by 25%, with a loss of over a million adult learners so far.
• £45million has been cut from ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) classes, affecting 16,000 places.
• University maintenance grants for the UK’s poorest studentswere scrapped without a Commons vote, after a legislation committee with just 17 MPs present took the decision.
• The poorest students will now graduate with an average £53,000 debt.
• Around 45% of student loans will never be paid off, creating a financial time bomb for future years.

TUC "Britain Needs A Payrise" demonstration, October 2014. Credit: www.civilserviceworld.com

So I originally started writing this as a shouty Facebook post to summarise a few key terrible things the Tories have subjected us to since getting their claws back into government in 2010, and what horrors may unfold as the 2016/17 Budget is announced today. I've had to stop, partially because the list is now SO long - and I've barely scratched the surface, and certainly haven't analysed the impact on people's lives - but mostly because it's thoroughly demoralising to actually try and pull together a comprehensive overview of just how bad this government is. 

I haven't even touched on what they've done to the NHS, the conditions endured by migrants and refugees, our failure to address our role in climate change, human rights, civil rights, and so many other areas that the Tories are continually wrecking. 

We were sold the austerity package as the only hope of stabilishing our economy in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008/9. We were told there was no alternative, that we were all in this together. 

Well as the richest 1000 families saw their personal wealth double since the recession, while the net wealth of the poorest 20% has decreased by 57%, I don't feel very TOGETHER. 

With more and more devastating cuts wreaked on the most vulnerable sectors of our society, written into legislation by millionaire MPs who have personal stakes in private companies now holding contracts for the NHS, have massive property portfolios for private rental, and make a fortune from lobbying groups - I don't feel very TOGETHER. 

Countries such as Iceland, who were also hit by the recession, have gotten their economy back on track by letting the banks go bust instead of bailing them out, investing in public services and jailing the bankers who caused the economic crisis. Meanwhile, our deficit hasn't even been halved, when Osborne claimed he would have eradicated it by 2015, and we have created more new debt since 2010 than every Labour government in UK history combined. 

There was always an alternative. Austerity is a lie, and we continue to be conned by it. Eleven-million voters were conned by their promises in 2015, and now the remaining fifty-five million people in the UK are paying the price. 

Every single petition that calls on the government to reverse or halt another devastating decision under the banner of austerity, every last demonstration and protest, every piece of alternative media that exposes their lies - every small and seemingly inconsequential thing we do chips away at their facade. By getting organised, mobilising into a united front, and keeping up the pressure on them, we stand a small chance of making a difference. And if not, I'm sure as hell not going to let them get away quietly.

This seems like a logical place to plug the next People's Assembly demonstration. 

April 16th, central London - March for Health, Homes, Jobs, and Education.

On the campaign for electoral reform: "I didn't vote for these cuts".

"Two very different ideas are usually confounded under the name democracy. The pure idea of democracy, according to its definition, is the government of the whole people by the whole people, equally represented. Democracy as commonly conceived and hitherto practised is the government of the whole people by a mere majority of the people, exclusively represented. The former is synonymous with the equality of all citizens; the latter, strangely confounded with it, is a government of privilege, in favour of the numerical majority, who alone possess practically any voice in the State. This is the inevitable consequence of the manner in which the votes are now taken, to the complete disfranchisement of minorities." 

-John Stuart Mill, Representative Government, 1861

The 2015 general election... I'm still struggling to find words that really convey how I'm feeling, having watched with increasing despondency as the results rolled in and the Conservative seats went up and up. None of the opinion polls from the past few months indicated that we were headed for a Conservative majority, and there is a definite mood of pure dread at what the election result will mean for vulnerable people who have already borne 5 years of devastating austerity measures. 

There are some messages of hope, however. Caroline Lucas, Green MP for Brighton Pavilion, was re-elected with a massively increased majority. All over the UK, the Greens' share of the vote has surged upwards, with us coming second in more seats than ever before and sending a clear message to the establishment that people are not happy with the status quo and that the First Past the Post voting system needs to go. 

The Tories may have a majority this time, but it is a much smaller majority than the last government, with 331 seats compared to the 363 seats that made up the Coalition Government which formed after the 2010 election (306 Conservative, 57 Liberal Democrats). When you factor in the enormous increase in the presence of the SNP, who now have 56 MPs (up from their previous number of 6), a different picture of parliament emerges. There is now a much stronger - much needed - anti-austerity presence in parliament than ever before.

It is an indictment of our outdated voting system that we once again have a Prime Minister and a government controlled by a party whom two-thirds of voters didn't elect. If we include the number of people who didn't vote at all, the Conservative vote share drops to less than a quarter. 

More than 75% of registered UK voters didn't vote for a Conservative MP, and yet because of the First Past the Post system, 100% of people living in the UK will have to live under Conservative policies. 

Realising that little point has gone some way to restoring my faith in British people rather a lot, having spent a reasonable amount of the past couple of days wondering how on earth so many could vote for a party who have overseen such horrendous consequences of the austerity agenda, and an abject failure to have achieved their own goal of reducing national debt and eradicating the budget deficit in the process. 

On my way to the People's Assembly "No More Austerity" demo, June 2014

To briefly address those who may counter by saying that the call for electoral reform is because lefties are sore losers, I'd just like to point out that moving away from First Past the Post is something supported by a vast range of parties, and that the biggest gains would potentially be for UKIP - a far-right party! In actual fact, a move towards a more representative voting system would benefit everyone in the country. 

Whilst I may abhor UKIP's exploitation of xenophobia and discrimination against migrants to further their anti-EU agenda, the fact is that people vote for them. In fact, almost 4million people voted for them this Thursday, but the FPtP system yielded just one UKIP MP. Furthermore, because MPs are only permitted to respond to issues from people living in their own constituency, it is only the 19,642 people living in Clacton who voted for Douglas Carswell who will be directly represented in parliament. Likewise, while the Green Party secured over 1million votes, only the 22,871 who elected Caroline Lucas as MP for Brighton Pavilion will be able to contact her, while the remaining 1,134,742 Green voters in England and Wales are effectively left unrepresented. 

Photo from Another Angry Voice on Facebook

An electoral system which leaves 98% of voters with no representation in parliament for their preferred party is simply not fit for purpose, and people all over the UK are waking up to this fact. 

So how do we change things? Moving to a system of proportional representation (PR) would be one step, because it broadens the pool from which votes are counted so instead of electing one MP per constituency, seats in parliament would be drawn from a much larger pool and allocated according to shares of the overall vote. Depending on how this is organised, this would mean that votes in Brighton are counted alongside votes in Sunderland and that no voter is left unrepresented in the way they are now. 

If we pooled all the votes from the UK and allocated the 650 seats in Parliament using the D'Hondt method of PR (as is used in the European elections), the make-up of the House of Commons would look like this:

If we pool all the votes across the nation to allocate seats, how do we then decide which candidates actually take up those seats? Without constituency MPs (which isn't compatible with PR), how do we ensure that there is a strong link between voters, local government and their representatives in Westminster? There's a few different ways of doing this:

• by country - group the votes together for Scotland, then England, then Wales and then Northern Ireland, and allocate seats accordingly
• by region - as in the European elections - East Midlands, East of England, London, North East England, North West England, South East England, South West England, West Midlands, Yorkshire andthe Humber, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland
• by merging the current 650 constituencies into fewer but much larger constituencies

Each of these methods would require another step to decide which candidates takes up the seats won; the European elections use party lists, where the parties decide in advance a list of preference for the candidates, and seats are allocated in that order. This has many criticisms, not least that it should be down to the people to decide who their candidate is rather than being pre-selected by the party. Another Angry Voice author, Thomas Clark, has summed this up and suggested an alternative in his blog HERE.

When you change how MPs are elected, inevitably the local link to parliament is compromised. It is incredibly important for accountability and democracy that people feel that government is accessible, however, and so a move towards PR would have to go hand in hand with changes to how district, borough and town councils work. The most logical way to do this, would be to expand councils - have more councillors, devolve more power to councils and give them much more funding. Decisions should be made at the most local level possible, and that is something that the Coalition really undermined. 

My ideal electoral system would have fewer MPs, all elected by a form of PR; much more power and funding for local councils, with more councillors elected; reform of the role of MPs so they work more closely with councils to create a better flow between Westminster and local government; reform of how parliament operates, with the Prime Minister elected by MPs instead of automatically going to the leader of the party with most seats. 

If we can achieve this, and combine it with other steps such as capping donations to political parties, closer regulation of election spending, and establishing an independent regulatory body for press ethics, we could create a political system which is much fairer, more democratic, much more accessible - and actually represents the vast spectrum of political views across the nation.

All of this is possible. It's not a dream. Campaigning for proportional representation is one way that we can fight for the politics we deserve, but there are many other ways we can work together in the next 5 years against whatever nightmares the Conservatives plan to unleash. There will be demonstrations aplenty, community groups in need of volunteers, petitions to send to Westminster, social media to spread the word - and political parties you can join (*coff* join.greenparty.org.uk *coff*).

We've had a day to feel glum about the election outcome. Now it's time to dust ourselves off, prop one another up and get out there to fight. 

Remember, 75% of adults in the UK didn't vote Conservative.

Actually we'd probably have even more because nobody would have to vote tactically!

Immigration is a good thing. So there.

It's a contentious topic and one fueled with misconceptions and outright lies from certain corners of the media and political sphere. The general public are worried, no doubt due to politicians using words like "under siege" to describe the changing population of the UK. UKIP would have us believe that Britain is set to become a distant memory, while Eastern European migrants take over and we all start speaking Polish or Romanian or Bulgarian, or some mangled mixture of all three - but crucially with no trace of Engerlish remaining.

I'm being hyperbolic, of course, and I don't mean to come across as flippant. When you do start to research the facts and figures behind UKIP's claims, you quickly realise how absurdly laughable they are.

What stops them being seen for the joke they are, sadly, is the tacit endorsement of their fallacious claims by the Labour and Conservative parties, who have responded to their rise in support NOT by deconstructing their rhetoric and promoting a more accurate picture to the electorate, but instead by competing in a race to the bottom on who can come out with the most hardline policy on immigration.

What IS the real picture of immigration then? What does the population of the UK truly look like at the moment? I talk to people a lot about this issue, and the same themes come up again and again. People believe that there are more and more non-UK born families across the country. People believe that British workers are being sidelined for employment in favour of lower-paid migrant workers. People believe that migrant families are prioritised for social housing and that the housing shortage is due to increased demand from non-UK born households. People really believe that the strain on the NHS is down to demand from "health tourism" and a higher than ever immigrant population. 

Where have all these beliefs come from? When I go out, for example, to collect my children from school, there's a definite mix of nationalities and ethnicity, but still an overwhelming majority of white British families. When I go out shopping, I see the same thing. Yes, there is diversity, but it's nothing like the "swamping" that some would have us believe. 

I've said before that this anti-immigration rhetoric forms part of a wider smokescreen designed to keep the electorate enraged about a total non-issue while the genuinely damaging problem - i.e. the carefully cultivated wealth inequality - goes unchallenged. While we waste time debating immigration issues, we are not talking about the economic crisis, or how the UK is in more debt now than before the coalition government took control; we are not talking about about how the European economy is MORE fragile now than in 2007; we are not asking where the £46billion taxpayers' bailout given to RBS has gone; we are not throwing every fibre of our being into protecting our NHS from privatisation, or even into understanding what privatisation means; we are not vilifying the government for the callous welfare reforms that have seen over 1million people turn to foodbanks, and incalculable numbers of disabled people die within weeks of having their lifeline benefits stopped. 

There are genuine problems with the UK at the moment; real issues that must be addressed. But immigration is nothing, nothing like the thumping great threat that UKIP, the Conservatives and the rest would have you believe.

Let's take a look at some numbers.

University College London, in collaboration with the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration, last year published a paper titled "The Fiscal Effects of Immigration to the UK". Their research uncovered some astonishing findings:

• The net fiscal balance of overall immigration to the UK between 2001 and 2011 amounts to a positive net contribution of about £25 billion.
• Recent immigrants are 45% less likely to receive state benefits or tax credits than UK-born citizens.
• By sharing the cost of fixed public expenditures (such as defence), which account for 23% of total public expenditure, immigrants reduce the financial burden of these fixed public obligations for natives.

Is your mind blown? Mine isn't, because I had suspected for some time that immigration is not only positive for the UK, but actually necessary for our economic survival. "Now then", I hear you murmur, "if this is all true, why don't the government just admit it?". Well that is a very good question, and I wish I knew the definitive answer. You don't need to look very hard for evidence that the government are not only aware, but actively trying to conceal the real picture of immigration to the UK - earlier this year, they came under fire for blocking the publication of a report which would have blown open all their reasoning for tightening up EU migration!

"But there ARE more of them!!"

Yes. Yes there are more "of them" than there were last year, and the year before that. Specifically, net migration (that is, the total number of people coming into the UK minus the number of those leaving) for the year ending March 2014 was 243,000 compared to 175,000 in the previous 12 months.

"That's a huge jump! Bloody Farage is right!!"

Hold your horses! Never take numbers out of context. Let's look at the bigger picture...

Total immigration in the year up to December 2010 was 575,000, while in the year up to December 2012, it fell to 497,000. As emigration from the UK has hovered between 316,000 and 350,000 per year, a clearer picture starts to emerge. In terms of population percentage, the net migration figures are not fluctuating all that much - certainly not enough to justify the outrage meted out by the noisy right-wingers. 

Here's a little graph for you:

I didn't make this. I'm not THAT much of a spreadsheet whizz. This came from the Office for National Statistics, August 2014 report on migration.

It's right there in black and white (and green and blue and pink). The picture of immigration in and out of the UK over the last decade really hasn't changed all that much.

So back to these problems facing the UK today; the housing crisis, the strain on the NHS, low-paid jobs. I'm going to elaborate on each of these topics in subsequent posts, but let me just say that not one of these problems is caused by immigration.

Housing

The housing crisis in the UK is a mess. Briefly, between the government selling off 2.5million council houses through the Thatcherite "Right to Buy" scheme and not replenishing the stock with new builds, we now have 1.7million people on council house waiting lists across England alone with nowhere to put them. Alongside that, soaring house prices and mortgage rates have been exacerbated by the rise in houses being used as commodities for investment rather than homes, making it more difficult than ever for first time buyers to afford a home. Meanwhile the private rental sector has exploded, now accounting for more than 13% of housing across the UK but with soaring rent, no long term security for tenants and the ever-increasing instances of homelessness caused by tenants finding themselves at the end of one tenancy but unable to afford the myriad fees of another.

Without private rent caps, the immediate introduction of more social housing and a drastic overhaul of the definition of "affordable housing", the housing crisis will not get any better. Immigration has not caused this, the government's appalling mismanagement has. Capping or reducing immigration will not alleviate it. Only sensible, proactive intervention from the government will. 

NHS

The coalition government's attack on the NHS is scandalous. The model, very simply, works like this: slash the budgets --> services decline --> "outsourcing" is heralded as the knight in shining armour --> wham! We have sleepwalked into a privatised health care system.

Source: Another Angry Voice

Do you remember David Cameron's pledge to not expose the NHS to pointless restructing? I do. And yet the abysmal Health and Social Care Act (2012) has brought about the biggest top-down reorganisation of the NHS in living history, not to mention removing between £60-£80billion of funding from the now-abolished Primary Care Trusts and giving it instead to Clinical Commissioning Groups, who are a prime source of entry for private companies to gain health provider contracts. Crucially, this move was not in the Conservative or Liberal Democrats' manifesto, so the public never had the opportunity to vote against such massive changes to the functioning of the NHS.


I will blog in more detail about the true cause of the NHS crisis, but you can read more here for now: Twelve Things You Should Know About the Tories and the NHS

Once again, waiting time for GP appointments, hospital closures and downgrading, waiting lists for treatment - none of it has been caused by immigration. ALL of it has been caused by massive government budget cuts. Capping immigration will not relieve the situation; only reversing privatisation and investing back into our hospitals and health services can restore the NHS to its rightful state. Incidentally, did you know that 26% of NHS doctors are non-UK born? Our lives, quite literally, have depended on immigration.

Employment. 

And we roundly return to the "dey terk er jerbs!!" argument. Anecdotally, I've heard this a thousand times over. British workers are turned away while the jobs are given to migrant workers who will accept a lower wage.

Firstly, this is largely a myth. In the few instances where this has happened, why does the migrant worker shoulder the blame instead of the unscrupulous and exploitative employer? Why aren't we stamping our feet and demanding the immediate implementation of a Living Wage for all employees, regardless of their country of origin? 

Back to the myth-busting. There is a 52 page government-commissioned report from the Migration Advisory Committee which you can read for yourself here. Briefly, the report found that the impact on wages from the flow of migrant workers was minimal, and there was only a weak - but not causal - correlation between the two. It also identified that there are specific areas of the country where migrant communities are more concentrated and so the perception of the impact of immigration will obviously be skewed. 

Plainly, there is no evidence to support claims that migrant workers are harmful to British employment prospects. Where exploitation by employers occurs, this must be dealt with by enforcing existing legislation about pay and introducing a Living Wage for all workers in the UK. Immigration in and out of itself, has not driven down wages. Capping immigration will not result in a pay rise for UK-born workers. Only decisive action by the government to recognise the current massive pay gap and support employers to pay proper wages can relieve this.

Considering that this will rank amonst one of my more epic blog posts, I really only have scratched the surface of the massive and intricate topic of immigration. I haven't even begun to talk about asylum seekers, illegal immigration, or the actual practicalities of any kind of immigration cap, but if I try now my fingers will fall off, and if you have to read more of my opinions, I suspect your eyes will mutiny.

I hope that I have successfully unravelled some of the commonly held myths around immigration and at the very least prompted you to question some of the claims made by the likes of UKIP and the Conservatives. I leave you with this image from Another Angry Voice:

Further reading:

The Telegraph: "EU migration is essential for a healthy economy"

Office for National Statistics (including all Quarterly Migration Reports): International Migration

Keith Taylor MEP in The New Statesman: "I'm ashamed of our government's stance on immigration"

Crisis Policy Briefing: Housing - the Private Rented Sector
Migration Advisory Committee: Migrants in Low Skilled Work

Tories. Tories EVERYWHERE.

Irritated; annoyed; exasperated; vexed; irked; raging; maddened; incensed; splenetic. Just some of the words one could use to describe my current mood after reading that the Green Party will be omitted from the upcoming pre-election televised debates while Nigel Farage has been welcome with open arms. 

Pffffft.

With over 20,000 members in England & Wales alone - an increase of 45% this year! - three elected MEPs, a peer in the House of Lords, London Assembly member AND an elected MP, not to mention polling level with the Liberal Democrats, the Green Party are hardly marginal. Neither are we a single issue party focusing only on environmental issues, though securing media coverage for our social justice policies is no mean feat.

Labour, the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and UKIP are all different sides of the same coin. The same old establishment faces, totally disconnected from ordinary people and the reality of life in the UK today, with policies engineered to satisfy wealthy party donors. Tories in blue, Tories in red, Tories in yellow and Tories in purple. They might have different party names, but there's barely any distinguishing between them anymore. For the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 to schedule debates between the four white male wealthy party leaders and to leave out the Green Party's female leader - the only mainstream voice of the left -  demonstrates precisely what an uphill battle we face if we want to relieve government of its corrupted self-serving infestation.

It's not just about telling people what our policies are. How can we expect the public to back something like the Citizen's Income without first unravelling all the myths about modern day poverty and the welfare state? How do we realistically expect them to trust us about our immigration policy while they're being force-fed a inflated figures and biased analysis of the current state of things? People are backing UKIP because they feel that is the party who reflect their needs, but those needs are based on the pervasive manipulation of the truth spread by right-wing governments and a sock-puppeted mainstream media. 

For the sake of democracy, we have to fight to have political parties represented fairly in the media - and I don't just mean the Green Party; I'm talking about the SNP and Plaid Cymru too. How much of UKIP's success can be attributed to the media love-in from the past year and the resulting self-fulfilling prophecy?

I would like to set a challenge for the British media; swap the Greens and UKIP round in your level of exposure. Spend the next 7 months talking about the Green Party as frequently and fervently as you have UKIP, and give the kippers the same flimsy coverage the Greens have had. Let's see what impact THAT makes on the election, eh? If media coverage hasn't influenced election outcomes, as you've insisted, you have nothing to lose and UKIP's "success" will continue unabated.

For the rest of us, there are numerous petitions floating round about the media and the Green Party. Sign as many of them as you can; let's keep up the pressure and demand some decent coverage.

38 degrees petition: Invite all small parties to join the election television debates

Change. org petition: Invite Natalie Bennett to join the General Election debates

38 degrees petition: BBC News: Stop the media blackout of the Green Party

BBC Complaints online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/complain-online/

N.B. The initial publication of this post contained the phrase "limp-wristed", which I have now edited out. I apologise unreservedly for any offence caused and will take greater care in future to avoid using such insensitive wording.

Big Brother is Watching You

"It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself--anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face...; was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime..." - George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

This week, my reactions to the news have been brought to you by the letters W, T, F. The period after the Conservative Party conference was never going to be anything other than stressful, as numerous plots to make our lives ever more miserable were gleefully unfurled while Iain Duncan Smith literally fist-pumped the air with joy:

From: Another Angry Voice

If there's a Tory I dislike even more than Iain Duncan Smith, however, it's Theresa May. They're all reprehensible, morally-bankrupt filth in my honest opinion, but May's unwavering assault on human rights legislation just cranks up my loathing another notch.  

A year ago, I read her pledge to withdraw the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which came just a couple of weeks after the country was outraged at the detention of David Miranda under spurious interpretation of the Terrorism Act (2000). To be detained for nine hours, prohibited from accessing legal representation, compelled to answer all questions asked of you and having your personal effects confiscated - when you have done nothing wrong and given no indication of wrongdoing - surely constitutes a breach of human rights. Yet the incident was ruled lawful by the Home Office, and now the Tories want to bring in yet more legislation that systematically dismantles our basic expectations of human rights, under the banner of "fighting extremism and terrorism".

It sounds a noble cause. Nobody likes terrorists. Extremism, as we've seen with ISIS/ISIL and Al Qaeda, is very dangerous indeed. But we are fools if we believe that this is the extent of the Tories' interpretation of extremism.

Just three months ago, news broke that Green Party members, Jenny Jones (Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb) - and Councillor Ian Driver, had been added to a database of "domestic extremists" despite neither having a criminal record. Along with thousands of other political activists, their right to lawful protest had been reclassified as "extremism" and used to justify the storage of personal details and photographs on secret police databases around the country. 

One of my earliest blog series looked at Human Rights and Human Wrongs, in which I explored (at length!) the logic behind my view that we must always observe the basic human rights of everyone, even the most abhorrent criminals. You can read parts one, two and three here (get comfy first). Essentially, human rights are absolute and inalienable; one does not "earn" them, nor can one have them revoked. That philosophy is fundamental to protecting the human rights of me, you and every other ordinary nice person. The minute we start deconstructing the human rights of people deemed to be unworthy of them, we are on a very slippery slope which threatens anyone with a predilection to challenge the status-quo.

If Baroness Jenny Jones can be labelled a "domestic extremist" for her political activity, so can I and so can you. My husband jokes that if I'm not on some CIA watchlist by now, he'd be very surprised, but there may well be an element of truth in that. After all the definitions of extremism, and the legislation that criminalises them, are constructed by the people whose interests are best served by censoring dissent and preserving the social state which keeps them in government. 

We have also heard this week that Theresa May plans to implement "Extremist Disruption Orders", which will see people banned from speaking at public events, taking part in protests, having to submit to the police in advance any publication on the web, social media or in print, and having social media closely monitored. This is not limited to those preaching hate or radicalising young Muslims; David Cameron has said that this will look at "the full spectrum of extremism" and those who threaten to "overthrow democracy". I would be intrigued to hear more of Cameron's definition of democracy, given that he acts as Prime Minister in a country where two-thirds of voters voted for someone else. 

The past five years of Tory governance have seen inequality increase, child poverty go through the roof, untold numbers of suicides in the wake of callous benefit sanctions and ATOS "work capability" assessment, UK debt increase, NHS services privatised, social services cut, care homes closed - the list goes on and on and on. If you are anything other than wealthy in the UK right now, life is pretty scary and set to get much worse if the Tories are re-elected next May. I consider it my moral duty to devote time and energy into getting them out of government and fighting for a decent standard of life for everyone in the UK. Theresa May and David Cameron would probably call me a domestic extremist for that view and for my role in countless campaigns to overthrow the Tories, which puts people like me right in the firing line for all this anti-human rights rhetoric. 

Do not trust that this policy is simply about fighting terrorism in the form of violent aggressors. It is very much about enshrining the right of politicians to censor those who would speak out against their war on the poor.

Further reading and websites:

Human Rights Watch

Liberty - Protecting civil liberties; protecting human rights.

The Guardian: Cameron's pledge to scrap Human Rights Act angers Civil Rights groups

Politics.co.uk: Could Theresa May's "extremism ASBO" ban the Socialist Workers Party?
Vox Political: Apocalypse soon: The Conservatives reveal their real plans for human rights
UK Human Rights Blog: The Monstering of Human Rights

Old Hatred, New Victims: When recycling is a bad idea.

We've just passed the 13th anniversary of "9/11". I vividly remember September 11th, 2001. I was 17 years old and sitting in my A-level English Literature class on the second day of term. A friend's phone beeped with a text message saying there had been a nasty plane crash in New York and it was all over the news. The class soon finished and we idly made our ways home. I went to chat to my mum, who was watching the news in horror just as the second plane hit the towers and we remained fixated on the television for most of that afternoon as the events unfurled.

I felt something change that day. There was something in the air that was new and yet familiar at the same time. The suspicion, mistrust and, ultimately, hatred of a group of people sharing a religion - in this case Islam - that I'd so recently studied in its historical forms with regard to anti-Jewish propaganda in Nazi Germany. 

I'm not the first person to highlight parallels between modern Islamophobia and Nazi propaganda. This article "Same message, different minority" succinctly compares statements from self-titled "anti-jihad" writer, Robert Spencer, and Der Stürmer editor (1923 - 1945), Julius Streicher. Similarly, you may be surprised by the results of this quiz, which invites you to differentiate between anti-Semitic statements from Nazi Germany, and modern anti-Islam rhetoric.

The similarities are bloodcurdlingly abundant. The manipulation and misrepresentation of the truth is as pervasive today as it was 70 years ago, only this time it's directed at Muslims, not Jews. Then, it fed into pro-Aryan sentiment at a time when Germany was recovering from the First World War and national morale was bruised and vulnerable. Adolf Hiter exploited this and coaxed enough support for his heinous ambition to start a war with devastating consequences, not least for the 6 million Jews killed during the Holocaust. Today we see Islam conflated with extremism and terrorism, with degrading stereotypes flung around mainstream media with casual abandon, while far-right neo-fascist groups such as the "English Defence League", "Britain First", and the BNP declare themselves the line of defence against a perceived Islamic invasion of the UK.

I'm not a conspiracy-theorist. I'm satisfied that it's more likely than not that Neil Armstrong really did walk on the moon in 1969. I don't believe in chemtrails. I don't buy into theories that 9/11 was orchestrated by the American government. But if you ask me whether I believe that Islamophobia is a carefully constructed political agenda to justify the so-called "war on terror" that is systematically dismantling the Middle East in pursuit of its oil-rich land - then yes. Yes I believe this is true.

Do you remember the "45 minute" claim from the September 24th 2002 dossier used to strengthen the cause for invasion of Iraq? How we were urged to believe that Saddam Hussein had been stockpiling weapons of mass destruction which could target British soil in under an hour? Do you also remember that these alleged WMDs were never found, and that the UK government had to admit that the 45 minute claim was untrue; that there was no stockpile of weapons. That we invaded a country, killed over 400,000 people and left a legacy of chaos for which we should be eternally ashamed.

'Ahh, but Al Qaeda! Terrorists must be stopped!' What do you say to the revelation that there was NO evidence for an Al Qaeda presence in Iraq before 2003? Even more so, that the rise of the latest group, ISIS, can be directly traced back to the abominable bungling of the 2003 Iraq war by the UK and US governments? And for the cherry atop the proverbial cake, the allegations that the US government has in fact been arming and funding ISIS by supporting its allies in Syria, just as they aided Saddam Hussein in the 1980s.

Let's just take a step back from this mess for a moment, and come back to what this means for ordinary people at home. I remember studying anti-semitism in Nazi Germany during high school history lessons. I vividly recall everybody in the room feeling horrified and bewildered by the force of the propaganda that proliferated the era. We watched documentaries about Kristalnacht and the concentration camps that frequently reduced us to tears. And time and time again we asked HOW and WHY the ordinary people of 1930s Germany could have tolerated such vile besmirching of so many people just because they were Jewish. 

The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights was established soon after the second world war, with the ultimate aim of ensuring that the atrocities visited upon the Jews could never be repeated, that we as a global community learn from the horrors of our history and commit ourselves to never allowing it to repeat.

And yet here we are. Western governments are demonstrably complicit in the rise of organisations such as ISIS, meanwhile the threat they pose is used to justify military action in the Middle East and domestic tension is aggravated by an undeniably Islamophobic mainstream media. In short, if you make people afraid, you make them malleable and open to manipulation. 

The surge in support for groups such as Britain First is symptomatic of a nation whipped up into fear, anger and hatred. There is nothing patriotic or defensive about these groups, despite what they claim. Islamophobic attacks are on the rise in the UK and US, with attacks against Muslims in America having increased 1700% in the year after 9/11, and British Muslims experiencing violence and abuse every single day. Political figures such as Lord Christopher Monkton, former deputy leader of UKIP, spout such diatribe as: “Nearly all acts of terrorism perpetrated throughout the world in the past quarter of a century were carried out by Muslims in the name of Allah”. and newspapers continue to publish exaggerated and plainly untrue stories to perpetuate the propaganda of hatred towards Islam. 

However, there is a beacon of light - something that didn't exist in Nazi Germany, or even in any useful form around the events of 9/11. Social media has burst onto the scene and given a platform to anyone who wishes to be heard. Whilst that has been exploited by far right hate groups, it also gives the oxygen of publicity to those who see past the red herring of Islamophobia and are frenetically urging the world to reject the scapegoating of Islam, to look beyond what the newspapers tell us to think, and to expose the corrupted workings of governments whose vested interests are in the financial gains to be made from war in the Middle East. 

There is SO much information out there, so many ways to scratch beneath the surface of the information endorsed by governments and to question their agendas. We have the opportunity now to stand strong and refuse to be manipulated, to stop history repeating itself. Education and respect are the antidote to bigotry and ignorance. For every misinformed, hate-filled piece of literature, there exists a counterpart. Let's make the most of the internet and keep looking for the truth. 

I urge you to look at the links in this post - especially the quiz about Nazi propaganda and modern Islamophobia. They're a starting point for understanding the role of Islamophobia in the UK today.

Romani Ite Domum

Let me preface this post by saying that I have no issue with the government taking steps to lessen illegal immigration. What I do have a huge problem with is how this is being handled and the impact it's having on an already tense and volatile situation regarding race relations in the UK.

Two things in this week's news have grabbed my attention and got me feeling all soap-boxy. Firstly, the delightful "Go Home" vans pootling around North London courtesy of the Home Office's latest brain fart:

Bleurgh. Where do I start with this. "Go Home"... such a nasty, insidious slogan. There's no way the government chose this without careful deliberation and awareness of the far right connotations to those two little words. It's a phrase often touted by bigoted hate groups and levelled at anyone who looks a bit foreign. You don't drive a van like this around an area with a high number of ethnic minorities without expecting to cause some upset. 

Secondly and even more alarmingly are the spot checks at two London Underground stations by UK Border Agency officers. The news has reported that people from ethnic minorities have been specifically targeted by the officers and asked to prove that they have a right to be in the UK. Just picked off the street and treated like a criminal... Riiiight. Yep. I can see the logic in that one. Because there's no such thing as a white immigrant? And definitely no such thing as a British person with brown skin. Mark Harper, Immigration Minister, insists that the checks are based on intelligence and in no way utilise racial profiling but I think that's about as likely as me winning tonight's Euromillions draw.

It occurred to me this morning that three nations who were founded off the back of immigration and invasion also happen to have a beyond ironic problem with racism and prejudice against other immigrants. 

• Britain: we're a mongrel nation. There is no such thing as a "true Englishman" and there never has been. Vikings, Saxons, Romans, Normans - we've been invaded by just about everyone! We have been a tiny little melting pot for thousands of years and now we choose to get a bit tetchy about sharing our soil with foreigners. Lunacy.

• America - we stole America from the Native American tribes! Got lost on the way to India, found some new luscious land, booted out the locals and claimed it as the Free World (irony, much!). THEN we stole a bunch of people from Africa, enslaved them for generations and only in the last 50 years acknowledged their basic human rights, and yet still black people in America face daily prejudice and hostility.

• Australia - we drove out the indigenous population and turned the country into one massive penal colony! More than 165,000 convicts were shipped out Down Under over an 80 year period. The indigenous Aboriginal communities were marginalised as the white population took hold and made it their home. Australia is now notorious for problems of racism against Chinese and other South East Asian migrants and in the last decade has faced accusations of institutional racism against the remaining Aboriginal community. 

Of course there are issues of racism in other countries, and yes this is a very simplistic view of the history of immigration. My point is that immigration is not new and neither are we passive participants. 

What does any of this have to do with the UK Border Agency and the Home Office's ham fisted attempts at dealing with illegal immigration in Britain? 

Everything. 

The government have made what could generously be described as a real cock-up this week. If I'm feeling sceptical, I may call this a stunt to gain votes from the ultra conservative areas of the UK. At worst it's a divisive ploy, drawing on ignorance and toying with the already fragile relationships between those who make and keep the polices, and those who have to adhere to them. It would not take much to reignite the riot scenes of August 2011 and it seems the government are being ever more explicit in taking steps to repress the vulnerable minorities, whether they be immigrants, the disabled or the poor. 

There's so much more to say on this, but for now I shall leave you with an alternative to the Home Office's "Go Home" van. I think this is certainly easier to digest: