Open Britain on Boris Johnson’s Further Assault on Electoral Democracy

Open Britain is a pro-democracy organisation, because the democracy we’ve got is increasingly limited and under attack from the Conservatives. I got this email from them yesterday warning of another plan in Boris Johnson’s sordid pipeline to decrease it even further. Apparently he plans to strip the Electoral Commission of the power to prosecute corrupt MPs.

“We have learned today that Boris Johnson is planning to remove the Electoral Commission’s power to prosecute corrupt politicians.

If he succeeds, our elections regulator will no longer be able to hold to account those politicians found to have taken back-handers or lied to the public during election / referendum campaigns.

Removing these powers from the guardians of electoral integrity would be the most outrageous attack on democracy since the lies told by the Vote Leave campaign in 2016.

We cannot allow a Prime Minister who was carried to power by a campaign so full of lies and deceit to neuter the official body responsible for protecting us from such lies and deceit.

Our democracy can’t stand much more of this. Enough is enough.

Over the weekend, we’ll be kicking off a campaign to ensure every voter knows what this outrageous Vote Leave Government is up to.”

This is in addition to his criminal justice bill, which severely limits the right to protest and his scrapping of the fixed term parliaments act, so that he put off elections as long as he likes so that we get an indefinite Tory dictatorship. Plus the proposed constituency boundary changes, another piece of Tory gerrymandering to go with the one they put through parliament under Thatcher in the 1980s. This will result in the Tories getting a further 26 MPs, according to the information given at my local Labour party constituency meeting Thursday night.

This is also the type of legislation Burlesconi, the former Italian president, used to put through their parliament. Burlesconi was the leader of the right-wing Forza Italia party, which ruled through a coalition with the separatist Liga Nord and the ‘post-Fascist’ Alleanza Nazionale. His own media monopoly meant that Italians were fed a diet of his propaganda while it excluded those of his electoral rivals. He was also notoriously corrupt to the point that many of the bills he pushed through parliament repealed legislation he had broken so that he could avoid prosecution. It looks like Johnson, whose administration is coming under increasing criticism because of numerous breaches of proper ministerial conduct and the way commercial contracts have been given to firms run by Tory MPs and donors, is trying to do the same thing here.

British democracy is being hollowed out, reduced to a sham, a democracy in name only, in order to provide a veneer of respectability to hide the reality.

That Britain is being ruled by and for the corrupt, corporate rich.

Tags: Alleanza Nazionale, Boris Johnson, Burlesconi, Conservatives, Corporate Donors, Electoral Commission, Leave Campaigne, Media, Northern League, Open Britain, the Rich