Jeremy Corbyn and the New World Order

Careful what you wish for.

On 15 July the Daily Telegraph ran an article headed

How you can help Jeremy Corbyn win - and destroy the Labour Party

Sign up today to make sure the bearded socialist voter-repellent becomes the next Labour leader - and dooms the party forever

They failed to explain why 'bearded' is derogatory. Perhaps it's an allusion to the fact that beards have long been understood as tools of revolution.

Whatever, as Corbyn turned out to be genuinely popular - the Labour candidate most likely to win supporters from other parties including UKIP - the Telegraph changed tack with a range of increasingly silly stories.

Just five weeks after publishing heir step by step guide to getting Corbyn in power they told us of

Jeremy Corbyn’s plan to turn Britain into Zimbabwe

They matched that linguistic flatulence with this shocking news earlier this week

Jeremy Corbyn: 9/11 was 'manipulated'

In comments that will raise questions about his suitability to lead the Labour Party, Mr Corbyn appeared to blame George Bush and Tony Blair for using the September 11 attacks in New York to allow them to go to war

Whilst it's hilarious that a statement of bald fact can be seen as an indication of something deranged, there is a sinister undercurrent. It's an attempt to make Corbyn look like a conspiracist.

They cite the 'he said Bin Laden's death was a tragedy' tripe again (even though he didn't, as the clip of context proves).

They continue with

he wrote a series of articles which appear to have endorsed the conspiracy theory about the “New World Order”. The “New World Order” conspiracy is frequently linked to theories about the so-called “Illuminati” and claims about a “totalitarian world government”. 

This is worth looking at. Much of Corbyn's support comes from young people, many of them will not know that the phrase referred to something different to an older generation in the time when Corbyn said it.

In 1991, the Soviet bloc had just collapsed. The Cold War world of two superpowers had ended, leaving one remaining. The American establishment saw that it could bestride the globe unchallenged. The phrase New World Order was used to describe the American-led post-Soviet neoliberal momentum. President Bush used it in a speech to Congress in September 1990.

Corbyn's 'series of articles' is actually two and a half uses of the phrase in 1991-1992. Firstly

We now know that the Gulf War was a curtain-raiser for the New World Order: the rich and powerful, white and western will be able to maintain the present economic order with free use of all the weapons they wish for.

Secondly,

What is required now is a bold, democratic alternative to the New World Order. The US veto at the Earth summit in Rio...shows just who calls the shots in this New World Order and who will be asked to foot the bill

And finally, not even using the full phrase or capitals,

The aim of the war machine of the United States is to maintain a world order dominated by the banks and multinational companies of Europe and North America.

None of this comes anywhere close to saying there is a cabal of Jewish bankers and/or lizards who organised 9/11 as part of their plan for world government.

It is plain that Corbyn was using the commonplace, President Bush definition. In recent years, especially since 9/11, it has come to have the conspiracist meaning. The Telegraph seems unable to find Corbyn saying it since 1992, however.

Their sleight of hand in implying he means the latter definition is blatantly dishonest, as daft as someone thinking their nan calling her happy mood 'gay' means she's suddenly embraced her inner lesbian.

In case there's an residual doubt, Corbyn has specifically mentioned conspiracy theories this year.

Mr Corbyn wholly rejects the conspiracy theory and ‘truther’ theories about the terrorist attacks on September 11th 2001, which are distressing to the families and friends of those lost and hurt on that day and very often involve antisemitic views to which he has - and always will be - opposed.

 

Jeremymandering the Labour Leadership Election

Leon Trotsky, Corbynite

The Labour Party is celebrating the 75th anniversary of Stalin's assassination of Leon Trotsky by having a purge of the party.

The whole Labour leadership election, especially the anti-Corbyn onslaught, has been fraught with contradictions.

Jeremy Corbyn will be unelectable said Gordon Brown, a prime minister who was never elected.

Corbyn's policies are unpopular, says Iraq-invading Tony Blair.

Corbyn would be a throwback to 1983, say the people who want it to be 1997.

Corbyn's too left wing to win, say supporters of Tony Blair, even though every Labour prime minister before Blair won with a greater share of the vote and more left wing manifesto.

Corbyn is dodgy for his links to Sinn Fein, say the same people who praised Mo Mowlam for talking to the IRA in order to bring about the Good Friday agreement.

He is evil for his links to Hamas, say the New Labour stalwarts who spent their time in government using public money to subsidise sending vast arsenals to Saudi Arabia.

We need to be tough on benefits says Andy Burnham, who claims £17,000 of public money a year to rent a flat whilst he owns one round the corner that he rents out.

Hillsborough justice campaigner Andy Burnham advertising The Sun

You can't join a party and alter its historic fundamental politics to suit you, say the people who came into Keir Hardie's socialist party and abolished Clause IV.

We need to win over people who didn't vote for us in May, say the whole party as they purge anyone they suspect of recently supporting other parties. At least, if it's parties from the left. Quentin Davies beat Labour candidates in seven general elections during his thirty years as a Tory MP. He defected to Labour and was eligible to vote in both the last and current leadership elections.

As Paul Bassett Davies said,

“I wouldn’t want to belong to any Labour party that would have me as a member.”
 - Karl ‘Groucho’ Marx.

THROWING IT BACK IN OUR FACES

I lose count of the number of times in the past when some Labour bod has seen my political enthusiasm and urged me to join the party. I have always replied that they don't reflect my ideas. Invariably, I was told that's exactly why I should join the party, to change it from the inside.

Now that people are joining up, Labour don't want them. Twenty years ago the newly elected leader Tony Blair promised a million members. He peaked at about 400,000. Since Corbyn has been a serious challenger membership has soared to 600,000, its biggest spike since 1951. They got 150,000 of those - the size of the entire Tory membership - on a single day last week.

Labour would have us believe that these are Trotskyite entryists. Half a million people in the UK will pay money to have a dictatorship of the proletariat. Who knew?

Mhairi Black's maiden speech went viral because it articulated so much of what people are consciously feeling, yet are not seeing in our elected representatives. She described growing up in a socialist Labour household but

we didn't leave the Labour Party, the Labour Party left us.

So many lifetime Labour people - either active supporters or 'lesser of the evils' voters - left because of the Iraq War, PFI, sticking to Tory spending plans, failure to build council homes, clampdowns on civil liberties and breaches of basic human rights like detention without trial (the Tories are worse, sure, but if Labour had won in 2010 we'd all be carrying ID cards by now).

The mushy merging of parliamentary politics into the same ideas spun by the same kind of people means there's nothing to choose from. If Labour agree with the mainstream parties that the problems are immigration, the deficit and benefit claimants then it's no surprise that everyone votes for parties who will deal with these 'problems' properly. It's notable that three of the Labour contenders are from the cosseted Armaniworld career path of Oxbridge > special advisor > safe seat.

The SNP, Greens and UKIP have benefited hugely from this, sharing six and a half million votes between them in May. With Corbyn polling as the Labour contender most likely to take votes from those parties, and his policies such as renationalisation of railways popular with the majority of voters of every party taken separately (even the Tories & UKIP), the idea that he is unelectable is yet another heehawing from the gullet of New Labour's pushmi-pullyu.

Under our absurd electoral system, adding more votes in Labour heartlands won't help Labour win more seats. But, irrespective of whatever they take back in Scotland, if they act in alliance with the SNP, Plaid Cymru and Greens (and the LibDems if they reject their neoliberalism and reclaim their position as a party that champions civil liberties) then a win in 2020 is more than feasible. More to the point, a win on a platform of social welfare and compassion.

LOOKING FURTHER AHEAD

It's about more than poaching votes from other parties, though. Perhaps the 5% Labour need isn't in the 24% who voted Tory, but the 34% who didn't vote. The biggest group of non-voters are young people. The biggest group of Corbyn supporters are young people. People who were 10 in 1997 are 28 today - Corbyn is the first time they've heard anything from a mainsteam party politician apart from oleaginous spin and focus-grouped management speak.

There is also something stirring beyond the ballot box. A sense of anger at the rich taking from the poor, a fierce will to defend beloved public institutions like the NHS and BBC, a desire to engage and actively create justice. There is a thirst for compassion so profound that an unrevolutionary old-school Labour centrist (Corbyn's policies are no further left than Neil Kinnock's) can seem like a messiah. This bodes well for the potential of more radical change that is never found in any party's manifesto.

A massive social movement millions strong is poised, asking Labour to lead it. The party is doing its best to fend it off. People whose only sin was to join the Greens for a few weeks in the run-up to the general election are being denied the chance to vote. The deregistering of people who have already voted Corbyn and the binning of their votes is blatant Jeremymandering.

As the person who sent Trotsky's assassin said,

The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.

= = = =

If you have been knocked back in the purge, try calling the Labour party on 0845 0922299. They appear to be realising this is backfiring and say some people were sent the email 'by mistake'. 

Repealing Our Humanity

Six months ago it would have been quite a funny joke - if the Tories get a majority they'll repeal the Human Rights Act and replace it with a bill of rights drawn up by Michael Gove.

As axeman Education Secretary, Gove tore through at such a pace that by the time the opposition had mobilised his plans were all inked and in train. We can expect the same style in his new role as Justice Secretary. Already the Tories are making loud noises about prioritising their manifesto promise to repeal the Human Rights Act (except in Scotland) and having it in the forthcoming Queen's speech.

The tabloid press hate human rights because they protect us from the kind of breaches of privacy that make stories that editors salivate over.

Despite Tories, Ukippers and other right wingers using the blanket term 'Europe', the rights enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights are nothing to do with the EU. Leaving the EU wouldn't affect our human rights at all.

It's part of being a member of the larger, older Council of Europe. It was formed by the Treaty of London in 1949 as part of the rebuilding of Europe after the war and the effort to create stable structures that prevented such legal state horrors from being perpetrated again.

Far from being something imposed on us from outside, the UK was the first country to ratify the ECHR after years of enthusiastic input from someone who features on Tory and UKIP leaflets to this day.

Then there is the question of human rights… We attach great importance to this… we hope that a European Court might be set up, before which cases of the violation of rights in our own body of twelve nations might be brought to the judgement of the civilized world.

- Winston Churchill, Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe, 17 August 1949

The court came ten years later, in Strasbourg. It cost a lot of money to bring a case there. But in 1998 Labour brought in the Human Rights Act, which made the Convention enforceable in UK courts (and obliged government to ensure new legislation is compatible with the ECHR).

Repealing the Act doesn't actually remove our rights. It means that once again, you'll have to have the greater levels of time and money required to take a case to Strasbourg. So human rights will only effectively exist for the rich. The rest of us become not human, the rest of us become untermensch.

Independence Day

With any argument against Scottish independence, the simple test is to apply it to Ireland. 

Did Irish independence betray the internationalist ideal? Did Ireland manage OK with shared currency? Would it be better for Ireland if they'd stayed in the UK? Did we 'turn neighbours into foreigners'? Even UKIP don't mind Irish immigrants, calling them 'our kith and kin' earlier this year.

So it's a rich irony having an Irish UK resident like Bob Geldof calling for a No vote. In fact it's weird that Obama is too, unless both go back to their home countries and advocate rejoining Britain.

A Yes vote won't create a new border. That border is already there for many issues. It will increase its strength, but that isn't exclusionary. A country where, backed by a significant proportion of the population, the leader openly calls for greater immigration is not a place with those issues. Compare that with the main UK parties.

If we want to consider xenophobia and exclusion, imagine this: the Tories lose the next election, Cameron's out and they install a Eurosceptic. A deal is struck not to compete with UKIP. This coalition wins in 2020. Even without this nightmare scenario, if the tories win we're promised an in-out referendum on the EU. It's quite possible that in five or ten years the UK could be out of the EU whilst an independent Scotland is in.

The Labour Party talking about how Scottish independence is a bad thing because it puts up borders between people. That's the same Labour Party whose 2010 manifesto had a 'Crime & Immigration' section, like the two things belong together. The same Labour Party who sent a Home Secretary to help out nicking stowaway immigrants at Dover to show how tough they are on foreigners.

Gordon Brown says voting No is the only way to save the NHS. This is the same Gordon Brown, chancellor who presided over the marketisation of the NHS and the introduction of Private Finance Initiative where we pay private companies several times the cost of a school or hospital before we're allowed to pay any staff. PFI is credit spree timebomb, getting new buildings today by promising tomorrow's budgets.

The Labour Party, who only survive by saying "vote for us to keep the Tories out", are telling people in Scotland to vote against permanently keeping the Tories out.

A Yes vote is a vote for Scottish nationalism, but a No vote is for British nationalism. I know which one I'm more uncomfortable with. As Billy Bragg said on Tuesday

the most frustrating aspect of the debate on Scottish independence has been the failure of the English left to recognise that there is more than one type of nationalism. People who can explain in minute detail the many forms of socialism on offer at any demo or conference seem incapable of differentiating when it comes to nationalists

It's not just that both votes are nationalists, but of different kinds. It's that one of them is imperialist. Not only do most No arguments apply to Ireland, a large proportion apply to any country going independent from the British Empire. It's no surprise that a country that's consistently voted against Tories yet been ruled by them most of my lifetime feels like it's under imperial rule.

Imagine if you could have one vote on one day and banish Tory rule forever (and no, it won't mean the rUK gets permanent Tories). Anyone with compassion could only give one possible answer.

Bye Bye Blunkett

Five years since a cow tried to end David Blunkett's political career, the longtime ex-socialist has decided to do it himself.

The media has plenty of guff about how respected he is, with the only frequently mentioned blemish being his resignation when he got caught fast tracking his lover's nanny's passport application.

Fellow pro-war New Labour schmuck Hilary Benn said

His passion for justice and his determination to fight for it define his politics.

Blunkett was the Home Secretary who introduced detention without trial, which pretty much defines injustice. He dismissed the 'airy fairy' vision of people who objected.

He was the main instigator of the plan for compulsory ID cards. People forget how close we came - Blunkett had it put in the 2003 Queen's Speech and this led to the Identity Cards Act 2006. The voluntary cards were issued, contracts with incompetent IT firms were signed and a timetable was set for making them compulsory. One of the few benefits of the Tory victory in 2010 was the scrapping of that plan, their £2m compensation for cancelled contracts was loose change compared to the billions the scheme would have cost.

His belief that civil liberties are 'airy fairy' may go some way to explaining him voting against the equal age of gay consent. His prudish prejudice extended to criticising the Paedogeddon episode of Brass Eye without actually watching it.

So remember him well. Open your wallet, be thankful that it doesn't contain an ID card, and wish him good fucking riddance.

UKIP: A Criminal Manifesto

Among Nigel Farage's guests on last week's Question Time were David Dimbleby and Green Party MP Caroline Lucas. It was an interesting exercise in seeing how Farage gets most ruffled and interruptive when someone tries to talk about actual UKIP policy.

Previously, he's famously called his party's last general election manifesto 'drivel,' and just yesterday on Sunday Politics he denied the current manifesto promises tax cuts when it does.

But in the three days between the two TV appearances UKIP did something much more sinister to attack those who examine their stated policies.

You may have seen this ironic meme doing the rounds. Claiming to give '10 Great Reasons to Vote UKIP' it lists the abolition of holiday entitlement and cutting education spending in favour of the military as some of the less popular things the party is committed to.

Michael Abberton is a Green Party bod who looked for sources for the claims and produced a referenced version. Slightly geeky thing to do, but in an age when literacy is less about comprehending information and more about being able to discern its credibility, it's a laudable public service. Given that it uses proper sources and finds no evidence of three claims, you might think UKIPpers would welcome it.

Instead, someone reported him to the police for it. In real life.

Officers came round to his house and asked him to remove the tweet. When he pointed out that it had gone viral, they conceded they had no power to ask him to remove it anyway.

He's blogged it all here. He asked if he could tweet about the fact he'd been visited.

The straight answer was 'no', as this might appear prejudicial in light of the upcoming election and the police must appear to remain neutral. 

I have to say, I find it curious that he feels that

the police officers were extremely professional and polite and I couldn't fault their behaviour in any way.

Officers asking you to censor political comment when they have no power to do so is surely faulty behaviour. More than that, it is partisan, a breach of the impartiality they claim they need to be seen to maintain.

But the overarching oddness is that someone would complain at all. The meme just clarifies UKIP's actual stated policies.

However, as Owen Jones observed, UKIP voters' desires are largely at odds with the party they vote for. Away from the nebulous swirl of anti-immigrant feeling the party gets into trouble, hence doing the golf club bore act to talk over MPs who question them, or disowning their own manifestoes. Then beyond that, in the classic tradition of far-right parties, there are the unnamed supporters out in the country who get the message and take matters further.

UPDATE: 24 hours later, UKIP's South East chair Janet Atkinson called for anyone who calls UKIP supporters fascists to be arrested. 

UKIP Don't Hate Elephants, They Hate People

UKIP have got a freepost address so, if you want to send their leaflets back at their expense, it's easily done. It's been noted that, as they pay by weight received, adding a few extra items helps them spend the millions of pounds they've fiddled from the EU. Handful of gravel from your path? Out of date jar of gherkins? Every little helps. But few things are as heavy and handily sized as the household brick, which UKIP will surely have good use for.

It's easy to cast them as a party who hate foreigners - not least because it's true - but it misses the point and also misses a lot of the people on their hate list.

HATING WOMEN

On 12 September 2013, the European Parliament voted on equal pay for male and female workers. It was carried with an overwhelming 546 votes in favour. Among the 50 abstentions were UKIP MEPs John Bufton and William, Earl of Dartmouth. For the same party, John Agnew and Roger Helmer were two of the 34 (that also included several Tories) who voted against.

This is, of course, the same UKIP who have a major funder called Demetri Marchessini, author of a whole book called Women In Trousers explaining that such people are deliberately making themselves unattractive to men and that public trouser-wearing by women is 'hostile behaviour'.

HATING ACCOUNTABILITY

If being on the wrong side of gender discrimination is unpopular, UKIP went further. A month ago there was a European Parliament vote on transparency in clinical trials that was carried by an even greater margin than the equal pay vote. Fully 95%, some 594 MEPS, were in favour. Who were amidst the rump of 17 who opposed it? Stand up once again William, Earl of Dartmouth and his colleagues Roger Helmer and John Agnew, alongside fellow UKIPper Gerard Batten.

AND THE ELEPHANTS

Nigel Farage was absent from both those votes, presumably because he was on Question Time yet a-fucking-gain. However he was present on 15 January this year for a vote to combat wildlife crime, including the illegal ivory trade. This vote managed to be even more overwhelming. 647 MEPs - 96% - voted in favour. Six of the 14 who voted against came from one party. Once again William, Earl of Dartmouth took his place alongside John Agnew and Gerard Batten, along with Paul Nuttall, Derek Clark and their overseer Farage.

This one caught a big wave of meme-inspired public attention in the last couple of weeks. Why in God's name did Ukip vote against fighting the illegal ivory trade? asked an anti-EU rightwinger on the Telegraph's blog feed. It's a fair enough question in the face of what seem like baffling political positions.

REALLY THOUGH, WHY DO THEY DO IT?

However, our befuddlement is the product of our own failure to understand what we see. We imagine UKIP MEPs as political representatives. If instead we see UKIP as a corporatist sect masquerading as a political party then it all becomes clear. They despise anything that hinders profit, which includes many fundamental human needs. Now look again at everything they do. It all fits.

Their current billboard campaign shows a British builder* begging on the street because his job was undercut by unlimited cheap labour.

In their new election broadcast video, a British builder** says

Since the lads from Eastern Europe are prepared to work for a lot less than anybody else, I’ve found it a real struggle. It’s getting hard to provide for my family.

If this were really their concern, why do UKIP oppose the minimum wage? Why do they support the ultimate undercut of workfare, where waged workers are sacked to make way for the unpaid forced labour of unemployed people?


UKIP want the end of the Working Time Directive which gives us paid holiday, paid breaks, rest of at least 11 hours in 24 and the right to work no more than 48 hours a week. Those out of work would suffer under UKIP too, with benefits being further slashed and abolished.

These are the people for whom this most full-throttle Tory government doesn't go far or fast enough. Farage - who, like so many of the Tories he pits himself against, is a public school millionaire who had a City career before becoming an expenses fiddling politician - is using racism as a smokescreen for his party's drive for full corporatocracy.


- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

*The British builder in the poster, David O' Rourke, is actually an immigrant from Ireland. He's not a builder, but an actor. Last Wednesday Farage told the Telegraph's political editor that UKIP was the only party not to use actors in its advertising. Two days later UKIP said using actors was 'totally standard practice'.

**The British builder in the video, Andre Lampitt, is actually an immigrant from Zimbabwe, or Rhodesia as he prefers to call it. He is a UKIP member and a serious racist.

Tony Benn

I saw Tony Benn speak a few times but beyond what he said to the mass audience I was even more struck by how he treated people individually afterwards. Every personal interaction I saw of Benn's was open minded and enthused, the exact opposite of what you'd expect from a famous, experienced and busy person. He didn't see naive idealism as a fault, rather as the first ingredient for every great historical achievement.

He saw his mission to educate and encourage, but never to lose that core of principle. Thus, whilst he dealt with many issues in detail, he could deal with others in a single short line. Asked about the proposed Graduate Tax, he simply said, 'you don't tax people because they're educated. you tax them because they're rich'. Nothing more to add.

Even it was on telly every night, MPs stayed glaringly quiet about the 1996 Newbury Bypass campaign. A rare exception was Tony Benn who didn't just speak out against the road, he backed the vilified direct action. He put us in the long tradition of English rebellion and said we would be remembered long after the bailiffs, police and spies sent to thwart us were forgotten.

His belief in the power of change outside the walls of parliament led him, even though he was still an MP, to make a formal illicit tribute to Emily Wilding Davison by putting up a plaque in the broom cupboard in which she dodged the 1911 census as part of the suffragettes' boycott campaign.

He believed in action to challenge power. He personally fought the Nazis, he backed so many struggles that have now been proven right. When he left parliament he turned the cliche about 'spending more time with family' around, saying he was retiring in order to devote more time to politics.

When the Labour Party he so adored has failed to support a single strike and the modern generation of professional politicians have never put themselves on the line for anything they believe in, it's easy to believe that they don't actually believe in anything. Tony Benn not only believed in humane principles, he believed in people and refused to fall prey to the weary cynicism of the seasoned campaigner.

Testing the Waters

Remember folks, the lack of adequate flood defence and relief is because all the money goes on foreign aid, not because flood funding was slashed to fund tax cuts for the super rich.

We are the fourth biggest economy on earth because of our own hard work and natural superiority, and not because we spend several centuries looting the wealth of countries that we now throw the odd crumb of aid to on condition they let our corporate interests cherry pick their economy.

Whilst we are the fourth biggest economy, we are far from being the fourth-richest nation measured by average incomes. One that is rather better off on a per capita basis is Norway, which in the 1980s decided to keep 51% state ownership of its valuable (and finite) North Sea Oil resources, instead of chucking all that to the private sector. It has since been able to afford to protect its infrastructure from the very high levels of rainfall it endures. And also a load of that social democratic stuff too. you can go to university for free in Norway, even if you're from Eritrea.

Meanwhile, in the UK, we're told the coffers are empty, but since the 2008 banking crisis, banks have paid more than twice as much in bonuses as they have in corporation tax.

As the Met Office links the floods with climate change, long term flood prevention should have a focus on climate change abatement measures. Instead, the government has slashed such funding even when it saved far more money than it cost.

And so we end up wringing our hands and upholstery, demanding that the government answer the real question -  “how many BMWs have to get wet before the government stops trying to impress stupid African babies?”

We Are More Possible Than You Can Powerfully Imagine

The problem with working for social change is that you never know if you're wasting your time. Only hindsight, and almost always a considerable quantity of it, can give you clues.

Every successful campaign - indeed, most historical events - gets tainted by our perspective that includes the time between then and now. It makes it look as if what happened was fated and inevitable. Conversely, things that failed appear as if they were always doomed and those involved were daft to have even tried.

When you read what the contemporaneous mainstream voices invested in the status quo said about, say, the Suffragettes or the civil rights movement, you get a very different view. Likewise,when we get to peer into the minds and deeds of the winners we find that they didn't see themselves with certainty either.

Cabinet papers from the 1984 Miners' Strike released today show the government was readying itself to declare a State of Emergency and, against stated government policy, use troops to move coal. Even with that on the table they weren't entirely confident.

Minutes of the secret cabinet committee, Misc 101, reveal Thatcher and her closest ministers were unsure of what to do: "It was not clear how far a declaration of a state of emergency would be interpreted as a sign of determination by the government or a sign of weakness, nor to what extent to which it would increase docker support for the miners' strike."

In 1952 the government built itself a bolthole in case of nuclear attack. These days it's a weird tourist attraction, which has given rise to hilarious roadsigns.

A guide book to bizarre days out, Bollocks To Alton Towers, explains.

The Secret Nuclear Bunker at Kelvedon Hatch easily qualifies as The World's Most Terrifying Bungalow. It's a place made all the more extraordinary for its very ordinary setting, on a country lane between Chipping Ongar, once the furthest outpost of the Central Line, and Brentwood, infamously crowned The Most Boring Town In Britain.

At first sight an unremarkable 1950s farm cottage, this bungalow is in fact the tip of a government iceberg - a huge three-storey bunker with 10ft thick concrete walls reaching 100ft underground. The local villagers knew nothing of its purpose, being the sort of people who could, back in 1952, remain unfazed by 40,000 tons of cement trundling up the road to Parrish Farm. Even the contractors weren't told what they were building.

When it was sold in 1992 the new owners

found the floors polished to within an inch of their lives and grass clipped to nail-scissor perfection. The four bored guards who had been stationed there had made the place nice and tidy and nicer and tidier...

In four decades of active service, at a cost of £3m a year, Kelvedon Bunker was never at red alert status. It was, only once, cranked up to amber. Not, as you might think, during the Cuban Missile Crisis (which apparently happened too quickly), or the occupation of the Palestinian territories, or the invasion of Afghanistan. Kelvedon was readied for action during the 1984-85 miners' strike, when the government was concerned that the country might be on the brink of civil war.

They really though they might have misjudged it, that the unionised workforce might band together to stem the tide of neoliberal regression that now laps around our necks in 2013. It was in no way a done deal.

So this is why we keep fighting for the change we know is needed. Not because we think we are fated to win, but because there are things worth fighting for. Because even if we fail, we may have laid the foundations of inspiration and experience that others will build upon and succeed. But, most of all, because we cannot foretell the future nor know all that is going on today. As a banner at the Newbury bypass campaign said, we are more possible than you can powerfully imagine.

The Shocking Shock Doctrine

The difference between Labour and Tory governments is that you can keep up with the pace of neoliberal evil Labour inflict. The Tories blast such a blizzard that you miss a lot of it. The kind of stuff that cropped up every few weeks and made you eclaim that you can't believe Labour would try it now just zips past you in a sort of white noise of regression, a cacophony of coins clinking on their way into the overstuffed pockets of the already obscenely wealthy.

This morning alone I've found out:


- Having made a pre-election promise of no cuts to Sure Start centres then axed 500, government websites are having the list of closed ones removed.

- Having promised that the bedroom tax wouldn't affect families with carers, it's been shown to hit 60,000 of them. As predicted.

- Senior Tory Liam Fox says the ringfencing of the NHS budget should be stopped. He uses the phrase "can't be fixed by throwing money at it"; try that on any spending, it sounds convincing even when it's untrue. "You can't sort out a debt problem by throwing money at it". Dr Fox trained as a doctor at public expense before giving up medicine to be a Tory MP.

- They plan to let landowners remove public rights of way centuries old. Bonus points to the Telegraph for characterising walkers as "trampling through gardens" and rights of way that go "straight through houses". Not vast estates of dozens, hundreds or even thousands of acres of open land, then.

And I keep finding I'm the only person in the room who's spotted their 2015 manifesto pledge to repeal the Human Rights Act, with Cameron giving serious consideration being given to complete withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights, something that was reiterated by the Justice Secretary only last week.

We've just entered the last full year of this government. At this rate, that's more than enough time to push us back to the 1830s.

Let Them Eat Jam

The BBC stays nigh-on silent about the privatisation of the NHS. But here's a BBC news story complete with audio about a LibDem MP (the hilariously named Tessa Munt) saying that a cut in jam sugar content from 60% to 50% could mean "the end of the British breakfast as we know it". All the news that's fit to, er, take up space with trivia.

The sugar thing, incidentally, seems to be less of a health measure and more to do with standardising for the global market. Still, surely reducing sugar consumption is the kind of thing that's a good idea for the health of the public at large. Maybe so, but then Munt isn't interested in the public's welfare.

She only got into the house of Commons in 2010. Despite such short tenure she's voted:

- to replace Trident (£50bn on unused weaponry whilst benefits are slashed)
- to increase VAT (a tax that hits the poorest hardest)
- to keep detention without charge at 28 days rather than reduce it to 14 days (LibDems, the party of civil liberties)
- against giving communities greater control of shops development to keep payday loan and betting shops out
- against investigating zero-hours contracts with a view to eliminating their abuse

But still, as long as you focus your media strategy on giving blankets to dogs and talking about jam, hopefully nobody will notice that other stuff.

Cameras Don't Lie But They Can Go Blind

As bailiffs beat up protesters in the tree protest camps at the Newbury Bypass, police officers would simply turn round and face the other way. Contradicting their sworn duty, in plain sight of colleagues and members of the public, they all did it.

When I asked why they weren't stopping assaults and arresting the perpetrators I was told, 'they can make a complaint later, if they like'.  The bailiffs were more powerful and so they were protected; had the assaults been the other way around the police would have piled straight in.

The other day I wrote about how Plebgate is getting the establishment in a kerfuffle over police corruption and accountability, and how a Tory MP's victimhood is different to that of Ian Tomlinson, Jean Charles de Menezes or Hillsborough.

Today another Tory MP, David Davis, has joined in, calling for police to wear cameras. Nice though it may sound, like the outrage over Plebgate, I can't believe it will be used to do much more than to serve the interests of the powerful.

Cameras have already been in place at many incidents of serious police wrongdoing. Let's look at cases I mentioned on Monday. When the police killed Jean Charles de Menezes, CCTV cameras on the station platform and the train 'weren't working'. The company operating the cameras and London Underground staff were reported to contradict this, but didn't have chance to check the tapes before police took them away, and certainly blank tapes were all that was returned to them.

But still, it was possible. When you consider the thousands of cameras installed across the country, it's a good bet that lots of them aren't working at any given time. This excuse surely couldn't apply for the G20 protests in 2009. More than 100 officers were deployed to monitor over 3,000 CCTV cameras. Unlike Stockwell tube, the area concerned was well known weeks in advance. There is simply no way that they didn't ensure the system was in full working order.

Yet we were told that there weren't any cameras in the area where police fatally attacked Ian Tomlinson. When it was pointed out that two permanent cameras controlled by City of London police were aimed directly at the spot, the statement was amended to say that the cameras weren't working.

At Hillsborough, crucial CCTV tapes were stolen. They have never been recovered. They were in a locked cupboard in a locked, alarmed room. There was no sign of forced entry and the alarm did not go off. When the theft was logged with a crime report, it was marked 'NO PUBLICITY RE THIS OFFENCE'. The words 'no publicity' were underlined twice.

With outbreaks of selective faultiness, police can remove technology from the case and bring it back to a contest of integrity. And who would believe the word of a civilian against that of a police officer?

stopping the wind

The 2010 Coalition agreement spelt it out in clear terms.

Liberal Democrats have long opposed any new nuclear construction. Conservatives, by contrast, are committed to allowing the replacement of existing nuclear power stations... provided that they receive no public subsidy. 

So, the most ardently pro-nuclear stance was one in which they were entirely privately funded. Liberal Democrats will oppose it nonetheless.

Two weeks ago Liberal Democrat Danny Alexander announced £10bn of public guarantees to investors in just one new nuclear power station, Hinkley Point.

This week the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) published a report on the smothering at birth of Britain's offshore wind industry. With so much coastline and much of it relatively shallow, this country has an enviable position to establish  massive offshore wind infrastructure. It is much more expensive than building on land, but then it also avoids many of the problems such as spoilt landscapes. Additionally, out at sea you get greater production and efficiency as there aren't the obstacles that create turbulence around turbines.

However the government's lack of enthusiasm means we are building much less than anticipated. It had been expected that a hefty kickstart would see turbine manufacturers set up factories in the UK, but because of the reduced potential this hasn't happened. Increased capacity would, in turn, reduce the cost of offshore wind, leading to increased uptake. More renewable energy, more jobs, everyone wins. Except the fossil and nuke corporations such as EDF, currently lining up to build Hinkley Point as well as the new 'dash for gas' stations such as West Burton.

Will Straw, associate director at the IPPR, said: "The current policy trajectory could achieve a worst of all worlds outcome – low volume [of energy generated], low jobs and high costs.

It's a straight choice - runaway climate change or stopping the fossils to switch to renewables. A large proportion of our old coal stations are closing in the next few years. What we choose to build now decides the source of our electricity for the next forty years. With the new gas stations, the government is setting us up to fail our already paltry carbon emissions targets. Unlike Labour they are refusing to commit to decarbonisation by 2030 and are striving to scupper EU targets for the same date. The greenest government ever. Vote blue, go green.

The lack of investment in renewables and the duplicitous state funding of new nuclear are not two stories. They are one. Money is being steered away from what is sustainable to what is in the interests of the energy giants. They have ceased to offer inadequate solutions to the climate crisis and are now blatantly disregarding the entire issue.

Meanwhile, despite it being banned in many parts of Europe, the UK is pressing ahead with fracking for shale gas even though its climate impact is comparable to coal. The same right wingers who decry the eyesore of wind turbines are happy for fracking drills to cover the countryside (it's been seriously sugggested we could be looking at 50,000-100,000 in Lancashire alone). So again, this looks feels like one story, not two, and that there are other motives at work. And again, follow the money to the shareholder dividends.

This isn't just about climate, it's also about fuel poverty. The government's own Committee on Climate Change said whilst gas is cheaper in the short term, by 2050 a gas-based electricity system would cost households £650 per year more than renewables. This makes the tax breaks for fracking look like an attack on social justice as much as climate justice.

MAKE THE CHANGE

The climate imperative means we have to act now, against the corporate distraction and deceit. It was like this five years ago. But with such a huge swathe of the population aware of the scale of the climate threat, it was relatively easy for small campaign groups acting in unison to have a big impact. Being the only folks with solutions that matched the scale of the problem, being so clearly right that they could prove it in two minutes to a 5 year old with a crayon, it swiftly changed the course of events. The NGOs did what they do best with lobbying, local organising and commissioning reports. The direct activists added the ramshackle pizzazz that tipped the scales.

When Climate Camp went to Heathrow to occupy land earmarked for a new runway in 2007 they expected to be vilified and dismissed. By the end of the year aviation emissions had been forced into the Climate Change Act and plans for the runway were eventually shelved. The following year they didn't know if they'd be facing the bulldozers at the site for the new coal power station at Kingsnorth. Not only did that plan get dropped, so did the raft of others that were due to follow.

The first of the projected 40 new gas fired power stations are being built. Next month Climate Camp style action returns with Reclaim The Power, a camp at the nearly-finished West Burton power station in Nottinghamshire running from 16th to 21st August. The pressure has worked before and it can work again, but only if those who know it's right come together to make it happen.



 

21st century slavery in the uk

None of us like to think of ourselves as slave owners. It has become unsavoury to have house slaves so we squirrel them away out of sight in places like East Asian sweatshops. With the advent of workfare, it has come a step closer to home.

Unemployed people are forced to work for private companies to get work experience. Except that they are given the most basic unskilled work with no chance of an actual job. When their placement is up they are simply replaced.

Major retailers like Argos and Tesco didn't need to take on Christmas staff, the government simply sent them free workers. In return, the government gets to lower the unemployment figures as these jobless people do not count as unemployed. On many of the schemes, benefit claimants who refuse to participate get 'sanctioned' -  they have their benefits stopped for months, even years.

Whilst many of the deprivations that the government are subjecting its electorate to are Tory inventions, others are not. Workfare is a Labour initiative, and if you're one of the 90%+ of people who voted Tory, Labour, LibDem or UKIP, you gave it the mandate.

The negative connotations on the words 'forced labour' are shied away from. When it was announced in 2008 the Telegraph reported

the unemployed will be forced to undertake voluntary work including picking up litter and cleaning graffiti

Quite how anyone can be compelled to do a voluntary activity is not so much a matter for journalists and politicians, it's more a koan for zen masters. But this idea is persisting.

The government petitions website has produced several interesting results. The 100,000 signature threshold that triggers parliamentary debate has helped advance justice for Hillsborough. At 10,000 signatures the government has to respond. Their comments on the petition to end workfare are perplexing, yet illuminating.

We do not have Work for Your Benefit or Workfare schemes in this country. Workfare is an American term used to describe employment programmes which force all jobseekers to work at a certain point of their claim in order to continue to receive benefit...

Mandatory Work Activity gives extra support to a small number of Jobseeker’s Allowance claimants who would benefit from a short period of activity.

The minimum sanction period for someone refusing Mandatory Work Activity is three months, a 'third offence' gets three years. They hold your family hostage threatening to starve them if you don't comply.

The clue is in the name. If it is not forced labour, how is it Mandatory Work Activity? In denying what we are doing to the impoverished we signal our inner squeamishness. If we don't think forced labour is tolerable as an idea, we shouldn't try to mask it with a false name. Instead we should exclaim the outrage that our consciences know it to be.

new lang syne

The MPs expenses scandal is still with us. George Osborne is a Chelsea fan (who else?). He just happens to have a meeting arranged with German official that lets him be in Munich to see Chelsea win the Champions League and witness John Terry's thuggish racist little hands hoist the trophy. That way Osborne had the trip paid for by the taxpayer instead of out of his inherited millions.

He also flogged his second home that we paid for and made a personal profit of £450,000. Items on expenses must be 'wholly, necessarily and exclusively' used in the job. Why is it 'necessary' to have a house worth a million pounds? With a fucking paddock for horses?

If the Tories really want to end the 'something for nothing culture' then let's have a 100% Inheritance Tax and administer it retroactively so it removes the fortunes that Osborne, Cameron, and Iain Duncan Smith are living off.

They aggressively portray benefit claimants as scroungers who get that 'something for nothing' at the expense of 'hard working families'. Iain Duncan Smith said that benefits have risen faster than private sector wages. Well yes, they have as long as you do some nimble footwork and only start measuring wages from where they slump in the credit crunch and recession.

But more to the point, it's not about competing with private sector wages. It's about ensuring that nobody goes hungry, cold or homeless. With food prices rising faster than either benefits or wages, and fuel costs rising faster still, the level of benefits has effectively plummeted. Families are choosing between food and warmth. People are, entirely predictably, being made homeless.

The millionaire government and the millionaire-owned media have flooded us with stories of the feckless poor. And it has worked. A YouGov poll found this week that on average people think that 41 per cent of the entire welfare budget goes on benefits to unemployed people, while the true figure is 3 per cent. They also found that, on average, people think that 27 per cent of the welfare budget is claimed fraudulently, while the government's own figure is 0.7 per cent.

Of the people polled, those with the least accurate picture of what the benefit regime is actually like were the ones with the most anti-claimant view.

The fact is that the jobless outnumber vacancies by more than 5:1. There are over two million people for whom there is no job. The demonisation of the jobless is a problem in itself. But having successfully done that, the government then turns on the same 'hard working families' with swingeing cuts to Housing Benefit (where 93% of new claimants are in work) and Tax Credits (100% in work). That time Iain Duncan Smith didn't even cherry pick his figures, he simply made them up.

The pared down Housing Benefit comes into effect in April on the same day that there's a tax cut for those earning over £150,000 a year. We can't afford housing for the poor and disabled they say, whilst ruling out a Mansion Tax. The Daily Mail hailed that as helping 'hard-pressed middle-class families'. Owning a property worth over £2,000,000? What the fuck is that the 'middle' of? The Tory front bench?

THERE IS ANOTHER WAY

In Scotland, they consistently vote against the Tories. As the UK suffers an accelerating runaway Tory train of devastation, forcing people into poverty and on to the streets, in Scotland they've extended the rights of homeless people to be housed.

Whilst the Tories strip the NHS, in Scotland - like Wales and Northern Ireland - they extend it with free prescriptions for all.

As the Tories hand out UK public services to corrupt profiteers and slash workers rights, in Scotland there's a law on the table to ban construction firms from getting public contracts if they've been involved in blacklisting workers (a widespread illegal practice to keep unions out).

As the increasing spectre of student debt forces young people from poorer families to opt out of university, in Scotland they have reinstated free higher education. Labour have criticised the move as 'regressive'. Mind you, Labour's response to attacks on the unemployed is to propose their own punitive regime. That's unsurprising given that the comprehensively derided workfare scheme was actually designed by the last Labour government.

Whilst the Tories resurrect zombie road schemes triggering a new rash of 90s-style road protests, and start a new generation of fossil burning that will shatter our carbon reduction targets, the Scots generate 35% of their electricity renewably, well ahead of their target to get them to the equivalent of 100% renewable by 2020.

Come independence, I think I'll be seeking political asylum there.

war on the poor

Last Sunday the Mail headlined the Tory declaration that there will be no Mansion Tax. The – and I use the term in its broadest sense – newspaper said that this would 'help hard-pressed middle-class families'.

A tax on properties worth £2,000,000 or more? What is that the middle of? The Tory front bench?

On the same day’s Andrew Marr show David Cameron heralded further billions of pounds in cuts to welfare (that’s ‘cuts’, BBC, not ‘savings’). Amongst these is the removal of Housing Benefit for people under 25.

They already get a lower level of Housing Benefit and the under 21s get a lower minimum wage. This is presumably because landlords give them cheaper rent and supermarkets charge them less for food.

There is a straight contradiction between the idea that those without work should move to get work and that unemployed under 25s should live with their parents. The only thing that ties these diametrically opposed thoughts together is that they punish the person without work.

Given that there are more than five times as many unemployed people as vacancies, it clearly cannot be the fault of over 80% of them. You can’t find jobs that don’t exist. Yet we punish them with workfare in which they do the same tasks handed out as sentences to minor criminals for no pay.

Cameron said it is unfair that someone can leave school and be unemployed and get Housing Benefit that is unavailable to their classmates who become students or find work. It's not half as unfair as a man who inherited £3,000,000 on his 18th birthday taking away the pittance that stands between impoverished under 25s and destitution.

Also, he's simply wrong. Those in work can get housing benefit if they’re on a low wage. Indeed, many of them do - over 90% of new Housing Benefit claimants have jobs. And students did get Housing Benefit until the last Tory government took it away from them. First they came for the students.

You can’t go up to people eating their dinner, steal a plate, then say ‘it’s not fair that only some of you have got food so I’m taking the rest too’.

But, and most importantly, it is not unfair that the poorer receive more welfare, any more than it is unfair that kidney patients get more dialysis machines than the rest of us.

I work and pay tax not because it’s a personal savings bank but because it’s fair. And actually I do actually get a personal reward. I get a society that is less grim and less dangerous for me personally. I get to live in a place where people don’t starve, where people aren’t forced to live on the streets, where the only question between someone and health care is ‘how much do you need it?’. At least, I used get to live in that place.

The majority of people hit by changes to Housing Benefit for ‘under-occupancy’ are disabled. Many of them need a spare room for equipment. Many have had expensive adaptations to their homes that will be ripped out once they move out, and then be paid for again to refurbish their new homes (if they can find them).

The genuine likelihood of this and other changes to the welfare system costing as much as they save show that it’s not about saving money. Just like the contradictions within the reasoning for the new attack on Housing Benefit payments to young people, it proves that this is ideological. It is War On The Poor.

class war comes round to your house

In the last days of that runaway train of Tory evil before the 1997 general election the man seen as their next leader, Michael Portillo, was still in full twitchy right-armed Thatcherite flow.

He made a speech saying that poor people should not be allowed to live where they choose but instead should be made to live in 'housing befitting their station'.

His choice of phrasing was almost as telling as the idea itself. The vision of robust class boundaries, ensuring the lower orders were punished for their poverty, and his own sense of snobbish entitlement.

But more than a decade into Labour rule - Tory-imitating Labour rule that disavowed its belief in public ownership and hooked itself to the freemarket bandwagon, saddling us with the PFI public finance ticking timebomb - we forgot what real full-throttle Tories were like.

THE LATEST INSTALMENT OF CRUELTY

Despite being twice rejected by the House of Lords, the government got its way with the 'spare bedroom tax' in the Welfare Reform Act which got Royal Assent earlier this year.

The new rules for Housing Benefit will take money away from people whose homes are underoccupied. Anyone with a spare bedroom loses 14%, anyone with two spare bedrooms loses 25%.

The rules have been drawn up to make some horrifying exclusions. They are not merely harsh. They will knowingly cause real suffering and - here's the proof that it is ideologically punitive rather than drastically cash-strapped - much if not all of the savings made will be swallowed up by the costs of the knock-on effects.

STOP BEING DISABLED

The majority of those affected by the change - almost half a million people - are disabled.  Someone who has a disability that requires a carer to stay overnight retains their spare room as long as it's used every night. But someone whose medical condition fluctuates - as a great many do - cannot keep a room for a carer, even if it means they will be housebound alone for half their life. This will lead to medical conditions being exacerbated and more hospital treatment.

As Shelter noted, the National Housing Federation estimates that 100,000 tenants set to be affected live in homes specially adapted to their needs. Encouraging these tenants to move would not be cost-effective as new properties would need to be adapted while aids and adaptations would be stripped out of vacated homes.

STOP CARING FOR CHILDREN

Foster families cannot keep a room for the children they care for. Just as the Tories want to restrict marrying a foreigner to the rich, so poor people are effectively deemed unworthy to foster. This will lead to more children in care, and more people growing up without the self-esteem and social connections brought about by family life.

Children under 16 of the same gender must share a bedroom. Children under ten must share a bedroom regardless of gender. Children under three get no room at all and are expected to sleep in their parents' room. This means that a couple with three or four young children must live in a two bedroom household, with all the stress on family life and impediment to academic work it will bring.

A separated parent who does not have custody of their child cannot keep a bedroom for them. The government has already changed the rules so that someone under 35 cannot have a self-contained flat, only a room in a shared house. Clearly, a vast proportion of parents with children under 16 are below the age of 35.

So, a separated parent would have to have their child sleep in the parent's room, sharing a toilet, bathroom and kitchen with a house full of un-CRB checked strangers. Many courts will see this as a 'safeguarding' situation and prevent custody or even visits in order to protect the child. This will lead to loss of contact and reliance on sole parents. This, in turn, will lead to more single parents claiming benefits and a further increase in the number of children in care and those needing foster homes, even as the supply diminishes.

SAVINGS COST MORE

Those living in 'underoccupied' households will run up arrears and then be homeless and in debt. This will mean an explosion in the need for debt advice, more people homeless, more vulnerable people in short-stay bed and breakfast accommodation, more mental health treatment required, and more people saddled with long term debt repayments taken out of their benefits, pushing their heads further below the waterline.

The knock-on financial costs of these changes, especially to the penal, health and benefits systems, are obvious to anyone who thinks about them for more than four seconds. It proves that this, like so much of the cuts agenda, is not about reducing spending. It is straightforward cruelty and open class warfare.

boris the bigot strikes again

Boris Johnson shambles along with his ill-chosen words and messy hair, and we see him as a bumbler who can't really do much harm. Ronald Reagan had a similar schtick when he went into politics, even though he was an accomplished union buster before he quit Hollywood.

Those who had personal experience of Johnson's tenure as editor of The Spectator testify to his sharp intellect, swift and complex grasp of issues, and persuasive methods to ensure he got exactly the articles he wanted out of his staff.

But, like Reagan before him, he knows the un-PC errant uncle routine is a great way to make even your opponents reluctant to call you out on your extreme right wing ideology. A laboriously constructed image of not being in thrall to spin is the way he spins himself.

Let's be clear about him. He's a vicious bigot who attacks the marginalised and favours the rich. Being in charge of a city utterly reliant on public services and containing the poorest boroughs in the country, he has special opportunity for damage and as such voting for him is far worse than voting for some quiet backbench rural Tory in Dorset.

The London Mayor's office and associated Tory establishment have sabotaged this year's Pride march. Now I know modern Pride is a far cry from the courageous political rallies of 40 years ago when it was a few hundred people being jeered by their police escort, and these days it's a pink-pound corporate jamboree. But really, I don't think that's why the Mayor has undermined it, do you? For the real reason, let's remind ourselves that Johnson likened gay marriage to bestiality.

Peter Tatchell lists many of the ways the event has been stymied, including:

- The Mayor insisted the start time be brought forward by two hours, citing 'safety issues' and 'problems' but refused to say what they actually were. This means people who already booked travel tickets wouldn't be able to join in.

- Greater London Authority insisted on Pride paying all money up front, even though guaranteed sponsorship money wouldn't come in till after, and even though the GLA didn't cough up its promised funding in time. 

 - They banned not just floats but all vehicles from the parade, effectively barring people who need vehicles for mobility.

- Westminster council sent a threatening letter to gay venues warning them that their licences could be revoked if they play music that is "audible outside of your premises", saying that Pride day must be treated like "any normal day".

It's all been done to run it down and discourage people from attending, seemingly solely because the Tories are an evil gang of bigoted scumfucks. We haven't heard much about that though, as the Mayor insisted Pride run all press releases past them first, and made changes in order to spin the Mayor's position.

And meanwhile, the much larger 'safety issues' around for the Olympics can be readily dealt with or ignored, anything needed for that is just fiiiiiiine.

Fuck Johnson, fuck the Tories, fuck everyone who voted for them.

the puppet apologist for abusers

Let's just remind ourselves of the official position of the police regarding undercover officers having sexual relationships with the people they are spying on.

Jon Murphy of the Association of Chief Police Officers - the body in charge of the deployment of Mark Kennedy and others who infiltrated the environmental and anti-capitalist movements - is clear and unequivocal.

It is absolutely not authorised. It is never acceptable for an undercover officer to behave in that way...

It is grossly unprofessional. It is a diversion from what they are there to do. It is morally wrong because people have been put there to do a particular task and people have got trust in them. It is never acceptable under any circumstances... for them to engage in sex with any subject they come into contact with.

Peculiar, then, that last week Home Office policing minister Nick Herbert contradicted this, saying that it can be authorised under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.

It's notable that Herbert, unlike Murphy, extensively hedged his position saying that it was only the case

in very limited circumstances... and consideration should always be given to seeking legal advice.

He then supplemented his speech with an odd notion.

Of course, there is another point that banning such actions would provide the group targeted the opportunity to find out whether there was an undercover officer specifically within their group.

The assumptions here are baffling. Do they imagine that all activists, no matter what their personal feelings, would allow themselves to be forced into sexual activity with people just to prove that they are not police?

The fact is that more than one of the undercover officers lived and worked among activists without having any sexual relationships, and without being suspected. At at least two of them would refer to a partner who lived far away and actually brought their supposed partner to meet the activists.

This successful tactic of supplying pretend partners means that not only did officers not need to enter into the relationships with activists, it points to something more. It strongly implies that superior officers chose on some occasions not to give pretend partners, that the officers who had relationships were, in effect, sanctioned and even encouraged from on high.

This would certainly tally with the testimony of another undercover officer, Liam Thomas, who says

The official Met line was 'don't do it', but unofficially it was condoned.

The real outrage of the undercover operations is not the sexual activity, it is the prolonged intimacy, profound emotional bonds and personal trust they fraudulently cultivated. One of the women currently suing the police had a nine year relationship, another lasted for six years. More than one had children with their police partners, men sent into their lives to ruin the womens' most important moral values, who became as close as anyone could get and then, with little or no warning and on someone else's orders, upped and left.

Whatever Nick Herbert and his novel interpretations of UK law say, that's a clear breach of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees that no-one shall be subject to inhumane and degrading treatment and that we all have the right to private and family life, including the right to form relationships without unjustified interference by the state.

It sounds like hyperbole to call what was done to these women the most complete invasion of someone's life that is possible but really, I defy anyone to say how it could have been more so.

Given that such relationships are known to have occurred since at least the early 1980s, and involving officers like Bob Lambert who had two significant intimate relationships and fathered a child with activists and then went on to run operations, it is ludicrous to suggest that senior officers were unaware of the possibility, and that the daily-contact cover officers were blind to how their charges lived.

As the womens' lawsuit progresses, the police must be terrified of the facts of this most invasive and indefensible of strategies coming out. They must be desperate to try to fob them off or invent a trapdoor to jump through and escape. And indeed, it's not just Nick Herbert who's been suddenly saying that sexual relations are, after all, professional and acceptable.

the Met had told the women's lawyers that "forming of personal and other relationships" is permitted under Ripa, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000.

Britain's only Green MP, Caroline Lucas, highlighted the contradiction and points out that whatever the truth there are officers guilty of very serious acts.

either rogue undercover officers have been breaking the rules set by senior officers, or senior officers have misled the public by saying that such relationships are forbidden.

Perhaps it's not so simple as that. Perhaps it was, indeed, officially forbidden clearly last year (and therefore at the time that all those officers were deployed), yet was still used by this unsupervised runaway train spy department as a deliberate tactic.

Under the new threat of accountability the police will have been furiously thumbing their rulebooks and legislation to make something, anything, slant enough to sound like it might make their actions somehow permissable. To back up their case, the words would need to come not just from them but the more objective and authoritative mouth of, say, a sock-puppetted government minister.

Step forward, Nick Herbert, apologist for the sustained psychological, physical and sexual abuse of the citizens he represents.