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Between
a first-past-the-post, ‘winner-takes-all’ majoritarian electoral
systems and a constitutional system that has few guarantees of
democracy outside of precedence, a determination of the ruling elite
to rule for the benefit of the City of London and the 1%, subversion
of a free press, electoral fraud and the use of the police to
suppress protest we are only a hair’s breadth away from tyranny in
Britain.
The
latest news this morning is that the Tories are planning to scrap the
Humans Rights Act.
Goodbye
to freedom. Hello to Big Brother.
Between
a first-past-the-post, ‘winner-takes-all’ majoritarian electoral
systems and a constitutional system that has few guarantees of
democracy outside of precedence, a determination of the ruling elite
to rule for the benefit of the City of London and the 1%, subversion
of a free press, electoral fraud and the use of the police to
suppress protest we are only a hair’s breadth away from tyranny in
Britain.
The
latest news this morning is that the Tories are planning to scrap the
Humans Rights Act.
Goodbye
to freedom. Hello to Big Brother.
Fascist Britain: electoral fraud and aggressive police tactics
Conservatives plan to scrap Human Rights Act – read the full document
Chris Grayling's
eight-page strategy paper 'Protecting human rights in the UK'
promises to 'restore sovereignty to Westminster' through a
parliamentary override, breaking the formal link between British
courts and the European court of human rights
Conservatives to push forward on manifesto and scrap Human Rights Act
Conservatives to push forward on manifesto and scrap Human Rights Act
UK: Police battle to keep anti-Tory protesters from Downing St
Instigators, 09-05-15, London.
Posted by Salem Wazaki on Sunday, 10 May 2015
Postal vote fraud: 50 criminal inquiries nationwide amid fears bogus voters could swing election
'Stolen': There has been a recent flood of postal vote applications in marginal seats, officials say
4
May, 2015
Voter
fraud could determine the outcome of the general election as evidence
emerges of massive postal vote rigging.
Police
have launched 50 criminal inquiries nationwide amid widespread cases
of electoral rolls being packed with ‘bogus’ voters.
Officials
report a flood of postal vote applications in marginal seats. With
the outcome of the closest election in a generation hanging in the
balance, a few thousand ‘stolen’ votes there could determine who
wins the keys to Downing Street.
Anti-sleaze
campaigner Martin Bell said: ‘There is actually a possibility that
the result of the election could be decided by electoral fraud.
That’s pretty grim.
‘We
are facing a situation where we can no longer trust the integrity of
our electoral system. It was a huge mistake to extend the postal
vote. It opened up our system to all kinds of frauds.’
Out
of a total estimated electorate of 46million, 7million have
registered for postal votes.
The
Metropolitan Police are examining 28 claims of major abuses across 12
boroughs - with four separate investigations in Tower Hamlets, East
London.
Labour
supporters stand accused of packing the electoral roll at the last
minute with relatives living overseas or simply inventing phantom
voters.
Officials
in Tower Hamlets received 5,166 new registrations just before the
April 20 deadline, and there has been no time to check them all.
In
Bethnal Green, it is feared the electoral register has been
deliberately stacked with fictitious names.
Yesterday
the Mail visited one four-bedroom flat in the area where 18 men are
apparently claiming a vote, all of whom registered within the past
month.
The
students living there were baffled by many of the names said to be
residing with them. Another resident was surprised to learn that
eight complete strangers were also registered as living in the small
flat she shares with her partner.
Other
addresses investigated by the Mail were linked to the Labour Party.
At
a property in Rainhill Way, Bethnal Green, where Labour Party council
election candidate Khales Uddin Ahmed lives with his family, seven
adults have suddenly joined the electoral roll.
HOW THE SCAM WORKED
via Facebook
Voters
in Bournemouth were casting votes on the wrong ballot papers – or
being told to 'come back later'.
All
nine polling stations in Kinson North and Kinson South were affected
by a printing error on books of ballot papers.
Meanwhile,
in Hastings, 200,000 ballot papers were stolen - divided up, these
would have been enough to swing at least 30 marginal seats. Hundreds
of postal ballot papers were sent out without the names of the Green
and Labour Party candidates in the Hull East constituency.
The
provision of pencils in polling booths is a requirement of section
206 of the Electoral Act. There is, however nothing to prevent an
elector from marking his or her ballot paper with a pen - but voters
were never told this - so everyone used the pencils - and that made
it easier to 'adjust' the vote.
Then
two ballot boxes were misplaced by election staff from an Eastwood
Hilltop ballot station, as candidates noticed the total number of
votes in Labour Leader Milan Radulovic’s battleground was over
'2,000 crosses too low'.
And
then Darlington Borough Council faced calls for a re-count after
UKIP's David Hodgson's name was left off ballot papers.
Funny
how all these 'blunders' never disadvantaged the queen's cousin, Mr
David Cameron.
Embarrassing scenes as bungling council bosses find 2 ballot boxes missed - after they announced a winner
The
mistake at Broxtowe Borough Council on Friday meant that up to 1,000
voes could have been missed and the seat had to be recounted
Police clash with protesters during anti-Tory protests in London
G20 police 'used undercover men to incite crowd
This relates to police tactics at the G-20 meeting. I doubt if the police were any better the other day in London
MP demands inquiry into Met tactics at demo
10
May, 2015
An
MP who was involved in last month's G20 protests in London is to call
for an investigation into whether the police used agents provocateurs
to incite the crowds.
Liberal
Democrat Tom Brake says he saw what he believed to be two
plain-clothes police officers go through a police cordon after
presenting their ID cards.
Brake,
who along with hundreds of others was corralled behind police lines
near Bank tube station in the City of London on the day of the
protests, says he was informed by people in the crowd that the men
had been seen to throw bottles at the police and had encouraged
others to do the same shortly before they passed through the cordon.
Brake,
a member of the influential home affairs select committee, will raise
the allegations when he gives evidence before parliament's joint
committee on human rights on Tuesday.
"When
I was in the middle of the crowd, two people came over to me and
said, 'There are people over there who we believe are policemen and
who have been encouraging the crowd to throw things at the police,'"
Brake said. But when the crowd became suspicious of the men and
accused them of being police officers, the pair approached the police
line and passed through after showing some form of identification.
Brake
has produced a draft report of his experiences for the human rights
committee, having received written statements from people in the
crowd. These include Tony Amos, a photographer who was standing with
protesters in the Royal Exchange between 5pm and 6pm. "He [one
of the alleged officers] was egging protesters on. It was very
noticeable," Amos said. "Then suddenly a protester seemed
to identify him as a policeman and turned on him. He legged it
towards the police line, flashed some ID and they just let him
through, no questions asked."
Amos
added: "He was pretty much inciting the crowd. He could not be
called an observer. I don't believe in conspiracy theories but this
really struck me. Hopefully, a review of video evidence will clear
this up."
The
Independent Police Complaints Commission has received 256 complaints
relating to the G20 protests. Of these, 121 have been made about the
use of force by police officers, while 75 relate to police tactics.
The IPCC said it had no record of complaints involving the use of
police agents provocateurs. A Metropolitan Police spokesman said: "We
would never deploy officers in this way or condone such behaviour."
The
use of plain-clothes officers in crowd situations is considered a
vital tactic for gathering evidence. It has been used effectively to
combat football hooliganism in the UK and was employed during the May
Day protests in 2001.
Brake
said he intends to raise the allegations with the Met's commissioner,
Sir Paul Stephenson, when he next appears before the home affairs
select committee. "There is a logic having plain-clothes
officers in the crowd, but no logic if the officers are actively
encouraging violence, which would be a source of great concern,"
Brake said.
The
MP said that given only a few people were allowed out of the
corralled crowd for the five hours he was held inside it, there
should be no problem in investigating the allegation by examining
video footage.
The artist taxi driver always has something to say
RIOTS OUTSIDE DOWNING STREET!!!!!
The
artist taxi driver
UK general election: Establishment wins again?
Neil
Clark
RT,
10
May, 2015
Football
presenter and ex-England international Gary Lineker once joked:
“Football is a simple game; 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes,
and, at the end, the Germans always win.” We could say something
very similar about general elections in the UK.
They’re a simple
game: Lots of parties stand, we have a "democratic"
choice, and, at the end, the party favoured by the British
Establishment always wins.
The exit poll on
Thursday night, which showed the Tories well ahead of Labour (despite
all the earlier polls predicting a close-run contest) caused surprise
to many, but really we shouldn’t have been too shocked. We've been
here before.
If you had a sense of
déjà vu when watching the results come in on election night, then
it’s understandable – what happened in 2015 was an almost exact
replay of what happened in 1992. Back then, polls told us that Labour
would do quite well, and progressives confidently expected the Tory
government to be ousted. But instead, it was Labour that fared
poorly, and the Tories were re-elected.
What Thursday
confirmed was that the Conservatives are Britain’s natural party of
government. Labour wins are mere aberrations and only come about in
very special circumstances.
Consider the facts.
From 1918-1945 the Conservatives were in power, either on their own,
or in a Coalition, for all but a nine-month period in 1924, and a
period of two years and five months between 1929 and 1931. They were
in power for 13 years between 1951 and 1964 and then for 18 years
between 1979 and 1997. Now, having won this week’s election they
will chalk up at least another 10 years in office. How does the party
of the rich and whose Thatcherite policies, by any objective
assessment, are positively injurious to the majority of ordinary
people, keep pulling it off?
It‘s important to
understand Britain's seemingly "democratic"
system is designed to bring about the "right
result"
every time for the Establishment. We’re allowed to have quite a
broad choice of parties, but the system is rigged to make sure that
parties who don’t satisfy elite interests are doomed to failure.
Here’s how it is done.
Labour Party leader Ed
Miliband arrives at his party's headquarters after Britain's general
election, in London, May 8, 2015. (Reuters/Paul Hackett)
Electoral system
Firstly, there’s our
hopelessly undemocratic electoral system. The Conservatives got 331
seats under "first
past the post."
But if we’d have had a more proportional system, the result would
have been very different, as this Daily Express article
shows.
Under the D’Hondt
system of proportional representation UKIP would have got 83 seats
and the Greens 24: instead on Thursday they only got one seat each
despite getting a total of over 5 million votes. People would have
been much more likely to vote for smaller progressive parties, like
the National Health Action
Party and the Trade Union and Socialist
Coalition, if we had a system in which every vote counted.
Although they did once
lose out by the system (in February 1974 when they got more votes
than Labour but less seats), first-past-the post has generally been
very kind to the Conservatives. Throughout the Thatcher years, for
instance, first-past-the post helped give the 'Iron Lady' huge
parliamentary majorities, despite the majority of Britons not voting
for her hard-right program.
Media
Secondly, there’s
the role of the media, which is overwhelming pro-Conservative.
Just four national
newspapers, The Daily Express, The Daily Mirror, The Guardian and the
pro-worker Morning Star, supported parties other than the
Conservatives. The Conservatives had the powerful Rupert Murdoch
media empire on their side and once again, the Dirty Digger’s party
that wanted to win the election did so, helped by the propaganda
efforts of his titles.
The national
broadcaster played its part too in maintaining the status quo. The
BBC makes some wonderful programs and has some great, professional
journalists, but its political coverage – particularly during
election time – is biased towards the establishment-favored party.
The Beeb’s sympathetic treatment of the Tories during Election 2015
shouldn’t surprise us, as the head of BBC News and Current Affairs
is a man called James
Harding, who was previously editor of Rupert Murdoch’s neocon
newspaper The Times, while the BBC’s leading political presenter,
Evan Davis, is a right-wing neoliberal who once wrote a book calling
for privatization of the public services. During an election
campaign, the BBC acts as a filter to make sure genuinely
anti-Establishment, left-wing voices are not heard.
I’ve been a regular
interviewee on BBC radio in recent years but in the six week election
campaign I got no call from the national broadcaster to talk about
politics and I know I’m not the only dissident voice who has been
passed over. When was the last time, for instance, you saw Seumas
Milne, Tariq Ali, John Pilger or Lindsey German, convenor of the Stop
the War coalition, on Newsnight, Question Time or indeed any other
BBC politics or current affairs program? There were plenty of
excellent, progressive parties to vote for in the General Election,
but the BBC – and other media – made sure we didn’t hear too
much about them and their policies.
Jenny Sutton, of TUSC,
eloquently spelled out the problem in an interview on election night
with Bill Dod on RT: "Even
though we have a presence on the ground what we don’t have is a
media presence. Aside from Russia Today, actually there’s been a
virtual media blackout."
In Britain, the
reality is that TV viewers need to switch on to a Russian network to
find out about progressive parties standing in Britain elections –
and that Russian network is of course, for obvious reasons,
relentless attacked by Establishment commentators who only want
elite-friendly voices to be heard.
The Establishment, via
the media, also acts to make sure that the election is only fought on
the issues that the Establishment wants them to be fought on. The
dominant theme this time round was the growing "strength"
of the UK economy and how the Conservatives were doing such a
brilliant job in sorting out the terrible "mess"
that Labour had left. "Labour
wrecked the economy, the Tories have got us on the right road, so why
vote for change,"
was the message repeatedly drummed into voters.
There was little, if
any, proper discussion of the Conservatives’ many failures in
office. For instance, the truly scandalous way they had sold off the
Royal Mail at way below its market value was barely mentioned. If
there had been proper media coverage of the way Tories have sold off
public assets to their City chums, and the future privatizations
Cameron and Co have planned (Chancellor George Osborne has pledged to
sell off £20bn more of state assets by 2020), then the Tories would
not get anywhere near the amount of seats they did.
Tory supporters hold
banners outside the Royal Horticultural Halls before Britain's
opposition Labour party leader Ed Miliband addresses an audience
during a campaign event in London, Britain May 2, 2015.
(Reuters/Stefan Wermuth)
Scaremongering
Then there’s the
relentless scaremongering about what would happen if voters voted the
"wrong
way."
This tactic goes back a long way. In 1924, there was the notorious
Zinoviev letter incident, which I wrote about here,
and which was designed to sabotage the electoral chances of the
Labour Party by linking them to the Soviet Union. The "Red
scare"
and/or "Russians
are coming"
line is deployed whenever the Labour Party is deemed by the elite to
be too left-wing. Those of a certain age can think back to 1983 and
the warnings of what would happen if Labour, committed to a policy of
unilateral nuclear disarmament, came to power.
On election day in
1992, the front page of Murdoch’s Sun, Britain’s highest
circulation newspaper, read: "If
Neil Kinnock (the Labour leader) wins today, will the last person to
leave Britain please turn out the lights?"
Labour lost the election and the Sun proudly proclaimed: "It
was the Sun wot won it."
This time, the
scaremongering concerned the SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon, who was
portrayed in England as a fanatical Marxist and nationalist who would
wreck the UK if Labour got in and was dependent on SNP support. The
only way to prevent the "nightmarish"
possibility – of a genuine progressive party which was
anti-militarist and anti-Trident holding the balance of power, was to
vote Tory.
“A week today,
Britain could be plunged into the abyss. A fragile left-wing Labour
minority, led by Ed Miliband and his union paymasters and supported
by the wreckers of the Scottish National Party, could take power…
You can stop this. But only by voting Tory,”
The Sun warned. Yet to show how cynical the whole thing is, the
Scottish Sun, also owned by Murdoch, urged its readers to vote SNP,
with the tactic being clearly to wreck the chances of Labour holding
on to seats in Scotland.
The scaremongering
worked again. The fear of the SNP in England and a minority Labour
government dependent on Scottish Nationalist support in parliament
was undoubtedly a big factor in the Tory victory and explains why
many UKIP voters, in seats UKIP had expected to win, returned to the
Tory fold.
Money
The fourth way the
Establishment fixes the election is money. As in America, winning
modern elections in Britain requires more and more money. The Tories
have this in abundance. Last
year, without much publicity, they pushed through a big increase
in the amount of money parties are allowed to spend at elections.
In the 2010 election,
the Tories spent over twice as much as Labour. This year their
spending was again expected to exceed Labour by several million
pounds.The best way to see the Conservative Party is as the political
wing of the hedge fund industry. Figures released
in April showed that 1 6 of Europe’s most prolific 50 hedge funds
were financing the Tories.
It was revealed that
the co-founders of one particular hedge fund had given almost
£950,000 to the party. Of course, the powerful financial interests
who bankroll Cameron’s party got the result they wanted.
Investigate journalist Nafeez Ahmed summed it up perfectly in one
tweet.
Nafeez Ahmed
Born to rule
Other social/cultural
factors in Britain also favor the Conservatives. The most important
of these is deference. David Cameron and his wife Samantha (aka "Sam
Cam")
are posh, very posh, and are, in many ways, the political equivalent
of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. Cameron’s inner circle are
from the same background. Chancellor George Osborne, like Cameron,
was in the ultra-exclusive Bullingdon Club at Oxford University,
while the likely successor to Cameron as Tory leader, Boris Johnson,
is an amiable Old Etonian who was also a member of the Bullingdon
Club. As was, incidentally, David Dimbleby, the presenter of BBC’s
election night coverage
while the BBC’s election night expert, Professor Vernon Bognador,
was Cameron’s politics
tutor at Oxford.
The ‘born to rule’
background of the Conservative leadership and the effortless
confidence which people like Cameron, Osborne and Johnson exude,
gives them a distinct advantage over the leaders of other parties,
who don’t tend to come from such privileged backgrounds. Because
they are so posh, the leading Tories are treated deferentially by
much of the media - just compare the very personal attacks that
Gordon Brown (Labour leader from 2007-2010) and Ed Miliband were
subjected to, with the way that Cameron has been treated.
So how can Labour win?
Of course, if the
presence of Britain as a properly functional democracy is to be
maintained, "the
other side"
has to be allowed to win elections occasionally. Since 1945 Labour
victories have occurred, but only under very special circumstances
and it’s instructive to examine closely what those circumstances
are.
Firstly, in the
aftermath of war. This was the case in 1945, when Labour pulled off a
famous victory. The experience of war led to a major shift leftward
in public opinion and Labour was simply too powerful to stop.
Conservative leader Winston Churchill warned that Labour, if elected,
would "fall
back on some form of Gestapo,"
but for once Tory scaremongering didn’t work. The Labour government
elected in 1945 was the most socialist in British history up to that
point and remained popular after six years in office. In 1951, they
actually polled more votes than in 1945 but lost power as the Tories
won 26 more seats. The first-past-the-post system, as in 2015, was
the enemy of progressive politics.
Secondly, Labour wins
when it has genuinely left-wing policies, and a brilliantly canny
leader with great popular appeal who is able to outmanoeuver the
Tories. This occurred in the period when Labour was led by Harold
Wilson in the 1960s and '70s.
Under Wilson, Labour
won four elections out of five. It was the pipe-smoking
Yorkshireman’s ambition to make Labour the natural party of
government and he very nearly achieved it. Wilson combined a
commitment to progressive politics - his governments extended public
ownership, redistributed wealth and kept Britain out of the Vietnam
War - with great pragmatism. In 1973, for instance, he "did
a deal"
in the toilets of the House of Commons with the right-wing Tory Enoch
Powell (a man who had a sizeable popular following) under which
Powell would call on people to vote for Labour, because of Labour's
support for a referendum on EEC membership. The general election of
October 1974 was very close, but Wilson won it - and his commitment
to holding a public vote on Europe proved crucial.
There were very
important lessons
for Ed Miliband here, as I argued last October, but alas for Labour,
Miliband was nowhere near as shrewd a political operator as Wilson.
He failed to support an EU referendum, which was probably a big
factor in why Labour lost crucial votes to UKIP in England on
Thursday. Wilson, needless to say, came under relentless attack from
the Establishment, which intensified after he’d won the election in
October 1974 on an unequivocally socialist program. He became
convinced there was a plot by the security forces against him - and
we know now that he wasn’t being paranoid. Guardian journalist
Jonathan Freedland has described the plotagainst
Wilson as"the
British Watergate, a conspiracy designed to pervert the democratic
choice of the people."
It all got to Wilson
in the end. Tired and not in the best of health, he resigned in March
1976 (a few years later he underwent surgery for cancer) and the
Labour Party failed to win another election for 21 years.
The third way Labour
has won elections is to effectively become the Tory Party and assure
the elite that a Labour government poses absolutely no threat to
their interests. This happened under Tony Blair and explains the
victories Labour had in 1997, 2001 and 2005. Blair was a highly
ambitious man with only the lightest commitment to progressive
politics and he clearly took the view, after four successive defeats
for his party, that the only way was to surrender completely to the
elite, and for Labour to ditch everything it had ever believed in and
become "New
Labour."
There would be no increase in the top rate of income tax, no reversal
of Thatcher’s privatizations and a strongly pro-US foreign policy.
Blair courted the kingmaker Murdoch: in 1995, one year after becoming
Labour leader, he flew out to Australia to meet the media magnate at
a News Corporation conference - one of several meetings the two men
had. Assured that Blair’s Labour Party posed no threat, Murdoch
decided to ditch his support for the Tories – and the Sun, usually
Labour’s most raucous enemy, threw its weight behind the party,
with the other Murdoch titles following suit. The result: 13 years of
Labour government between 1997 and 2010. In 2009, the Sun ended its
12-year support of Labour, and in the 2010 election, Labour duly
lost.
Barring the three
circumstances outline above, UK elections follow the normal pattern
and the Tories win. In the words of Tony Blair, what happened on
Thursday was just another "traditional
result"
for Labour, i.e. a resounding defeat.
The result of the 2015
general election shows just how hard it is for progressive politics
to succeed in Britain in a system specifically designed to maintain
the elite’s control. In the days leading up to the poll, there was
left-wing concern that the Conservatives would attempt a
"constitutional
coup"
to stay in power if the election result went against them. But the
elite didn’t need to resort to such tactics. Once again, they had
got it all stitched up beforehand.
George Orwell - A Final Warning
From
the 2003 Television docudrama: George Orwell - A Life in Pictures.
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