The ‘I’ on Labour’s Manifesto Policies

Thursday’s edition of the I, for 10th October 2019, carried an article by Nigel outlining Labour’s election promises. The article ‘What will be in the Labour Party election manifesto’, stated that ‘Jeremy Corbyn aims to target areas for radical change’. These were itemised and described as follows

Brexit

The plicy issue likely to be at the heart of the election campaign. One in office, Labour would spend three months negotiating a new Brexit deal with Brussels to enable Britain to remain in customs union with the European Union and be closely aligned to the European single market.

It would then organise a referendum within six months, offering voters a choice between Labour’s deal and remaining in the EU. Labour would hold a special conference to decide which side it would endorse in the referendum.

Taxes

Labour says its tax-raising plans would only affect give per cent of taxpayers. It is currently committed to increase income tax rates to 45 per cent for salaries over £80,000 and to 50 per cent for salaries over £123,000.

Cuts to corporation tax would be reversed and the rate would be fixed at around 26 per cent. 

Infrastructure

Labour is pledging to spend £250bn on upgrading the UK’s transport, energy and broadband infrastructure. Another £250bn of capital would be provided for businesses and co-ops to “breathe new life into every community”.

Nationalisation

Labour would bring the railways, Royal Mail, the water companies and the National Grid into public ownership so “essential services we all rely on are run by and for the public, not for profit.”

Minimum Wage

Workers of all kinds would be legally entitled to a UK-wide minimum wage of £10 an hour. LOabour says the move will make the average 16- and 17-year-old in employment more than £2,500 a year better off.

Free Personal Care

A new National Care Service would help elderly people in England with daily tasks such as getting out of bed, bathing, washing and preparing meals in their own homes and residential care, and provide better training for carers. The £16bn annual cost would come out of general taxation.

Free Prescriptions

Prescription charges would be abolished in England. They are already free in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. 

More than 80 per cent of English prescriptions are already issued free of charge, but in other cases patients pay £9 per item.

Boost Doctor Numbers

The number of GP trainees in England would rise by 50 per cent to tackle a recruitment crisis. Labour says it would mean an extra 27 million GP appointments per year.

Scrap Tuition Fees

One of the party’s most popular policies at the last election, Labour is committed to scrapping university tuition fees in England and Wales, which currently stand at a maximum of £9,250 a year.

It would also cancel existing student debt, which the party says has reached “unsustainable” levels.

End Rough Sleeping

Labour would end rough sleeping in five years by allocating thousands of extra homes to people with a history of living on the streets.

Outlaw Fracking/ Increase Renewables

Fracking would be banned “once and for all”, with Labour putting its emphasis on developing clean and renewable energy.

The party wants 60 per cent of UK energy from zero-carbon or renewable sources by 2030 and would build 37 state-owned offshore windfarms. it is pledging to create hundreds of thousands of jobs in a Green Industrial Revolution.

Scrap Ofsted

The schools inspectorate, which the party claims causes higher workload and stress for teachers, would be abolished and replaced with a two-stage inspection regime.

A Four-Day Working Week

Labour would cut the average working week to 32 hours within ten years, but with no loss of pay. It would end the opt-out from the European Working Time Directive, which lets firms sidestep EU rules on limiting hours to 48 a week. Zero hours contracts would be banned.

Overturn Union Legislation

Margaret Thatcher’s union legislation would be scrapped as a priority, and moves begun towards collective bargaining in different sectors of the economy.

Reverse Legal Aid Cut

Labour would expand legal aid as a priority with help focussed on housing cases and family law.

These are all policies that this country desperately needs, and so you can expect the Tories, the Lib Dems and the lamestream media, not to mention the Thatcherite entryists in the Labour Party itself, to scream ‘extremism!’ and do everything they can to stop them.

And you can trust that the party is absolutely serious about honouring these promises. Unlike David Cameron, Tweezer and Boris Johnson, all of whose promises about restoring the health service and reversing cuts, bringing down the deficit and ending austerity, have proven and will prove to be nothing but hollow lies.

High Court Judge Calls for Donations to Charity for People without Lawyers

Yesterday’s I for Monday, 29th July 2019, carried an article by Brian Farmer on page 13 reporting that Lady Hale, the president of the Supreme Court, had made an appeal for donations to a charity for people, who can’t afford lawyers. This should resonate with everyone supporting Mike in his battle against the false libel claim against him by Riley and Oberman, and for the 17 other victims of their vindictive legal mendacity. The article ran

The UK’s most senior judge has appealed for people to give money to a charity whose volunteers support those embroiled in civil court cases who cannot afford a lawyer.

Lady Hale, president of the Supreme Court, asked for donations to the Personal Support Unit yesterday.

She made this week’s Radio 4 Appeal, a BBC programme in which well-known people ask for donations to charities.

“I know how intimidating the civil and family courts can be for people without legal knowledge of help,” Lady Hale, patron of the Personal Support Unit, told listeners. “Everyone deserves access to justice whether or not they can afford a lawyer.”

She told the story of a woman helped by the unit after becoming involved in a family court fight with a former partner. A year ago, the then most senior family court judge in England and Wales talked about problems caused by increasing numbers of people who found themselves without lawyers.

It seems from this that she was mostly concerned about disputes in the family courts, but it applies right across the board. This has been partly caused by the Tories slashing legal aid, which has made justice unaffordable for all too many poor and working and lower middle class Brits. And Mike’s case appears to be another example of a SLAPP lawsuit, in which the rich and powerful attempt to silence political opponents by punitive legal action, which they hope their victims won’t be able to afford to challenge or defend themselves against. Mike, for example, has been forced to go to crowdfunding to ask for donations for his own defence against Riley and Oberman. He’s also been lucky to have the support of so many people reading his site, like Damo from Cornwall. People who’ve never met him, but enjoy and appreciate his site and the hard work he has put in trying to defend the disabled and their carers against a vicious, persecutory Tory and Lib Dem regime. I know that their contributions to Mike’s fund are greatly appreciated. But he’s not the only one to hit with legal suits he can’t afford to challenge without the support of charity.

This has to end. Legal aid should be restored to proper levels. And the libel laws should be reformed so that the rich and vindictive cannot use them to silence reasonable, truthful criticism. And legislation is definitely needed to prohibit SLAPP lawsuits by the corporate rich and political right. Only then can the poor really expect justice.

Rudd Resigns, Replaced by Safid Javid, and Deportations Continue

Okay, late Sunday night came the news that Rudd had finally done the decent thing and fallen on her sword. After saying that she wouldn’t resign, and would continue to stay in office to protect her mistress, Theresa May, she finally bowed to public pressure and handed in her notice. She has now been replaced at the Home Office by Safid Javid, who looks like the Hood from the Thunderbirds.

Mike and the twitter users he follows have had fun with the Hood, er, I mean, Javid. He was photographed standing with his legs wide apart, in a posture which I’m sure he thought at the time made him look like a powerful physical presence. Instead it made him look ridiculous, and Mike and the others have posted it next to photoshopped images of Javid as a male gymnast or yoga expert doing the sideways split, and Blackadder and the Prince Regent also standing with their legs apart in a silly posture from Blackadder III. They’ve also commented that it’s obvious the Tories chose him, thinking that the selection of BAME person to take over Rudd’s post would reassure Black and ethnic minorities that the Tories weren’t the nasty, racist party. The deportations of the Windrush children was just all a mistake, which the party now terrible regrets. Javid himself has appeared in the press making noises about how he will change all this. There’s been a clip of him on the news stating that he doesn’t like the term ‘hostile environment’. I also caught a snippet from the news on Sunday that he had appeared in the Sunday Torygraph stating that he also could have been deported, as his parents came here in 1973. This is presumably intended to reassure BAME and other voters likely to be put off by the deportations that, hey, he’s like them – he could have been a victim. Look, he shares their interests in changing this.

Except he doesn’t. And if the Tories expect public rage to subside now, they’re sorely mistaken.

First of all there were a few choice replies on Twitter when Rudd’s brother and cabinet colleagues tweeted their condolences about Rudd’s departure from government. They claimed that she was a nice, compassionate woman. The peeps on Twitter made it very clear that they didn’t think so. Rudd had presided over a system that deported British citizens purely because they were the children of immigrants. Others have lost their livelihoods, welfare benefits and been denied medical help, including for cancer treatment.

As for Javid, there was absolutely no chance of him being deported. Those targeted were the poor and ordinary. In other words, the people the Tories usually bully, in order to give more power and money to the rich, create a compliant workforce, and, in the case of ethnic minorities, satisfy the rabid racists in their own ranks. Javid is the son of a Pakistani bus conductor, but he’s also a front bench politicians, who also used to be a highly placed executive at Deutsche Bank. He is therefore exactly the type of person, who wouldn’t be deported.

As for his claims to be doing something to redress this scandal, he hasn’t done anything so far and I very much doubt he ever will. Javid consistently votes for the government, including the 2014 legislation that prepared for the deportations in the first place. And Mike has pointed out that one of the meanings of the term ‘compliant’ is ‘ready to agree with or obey’, including ‘excessive force’. This reveals the Tories’ authoritarian streak. He’s going to replace the ‘hostile environment’ with a ‘compliant’ one. Which he hopes the public will believe means the other definitions, such as following the rules or meeting standards. But in this case those, who will be forced to be compliant will not be the Home Office or the Border Agency, but their future victims. They want people to shut up and accept their maltreatment without question. After all, they removed the protections for the Windrush generation in secret, just as they started the deportations themselves.

Javid hasn’t removed the legislation and orders for the deportations. They’re still there, and there’s another flight schedule to take off this week carrying more deportees. He also lied to Diane Abbott. Abbott had made the point that the people deported were British citizens, but the law that protected them had been removed. Javid replied by telling her that it hadn’t, which is false.

So it’s simply a change of face at the Home Office, not a change of policy. And the architect of that police, Tweezer, is still in office. It was Tweezer, who created the ‘hostile environment’ policy when she was Dave Cameron’s Home Secretary and removed the legal protections for the Windrush people. The Tories claimed they were ‘redundant’. As the scandal has shown, they very much weren’t. And there’s more. Much more. Mike has reposted a number of tweets from Bob Strain detailing just about everything May did that has contributed to this gross injustice, including sending round the vans telling illegal immigrants to hand themselves in, cutting the Border Agency’s budget and personnel, as well as being ‘besieged’ by Black History Month warning that this would happen. She and the Tories also created the situation where many of the victims had to be defended by community law projects, because they had engineered it so that they were denied legal aid. Oh yes, and in 2016 she gave a speech that was reported to the authorities for racism.

Her decision to put Javid in charge of the Home Office is also something of a desperate reversal on her part. She previously had demoted him, which suggests that she is racist.

More recently today, Mike put up a piece noting that 32 per cent of the British people believe that May is responsible. This is opposed to 4 per cent, who thought that Rudd alone was responsible.

And they’re right. Rudd was partly responsible, as recognised by 25 per cent of voters. But May is the ultimate person responsible. She therefore should resign or be removed. The deportations should be stopped. Immediately. If Javid doesn’t stop them, then he too should be forced to resign.

Soft-Spoken Aristo Thug Jacob Rees-Mogg Joins Boris as Latest Tory Celebrity

On Friday, Mike also put up a piece commenting on how Jacob Rees-Mogg, the son of William Rees-Mogg, the former Times and Independent journalist, has developed a cult following. Apparently he has his own fan group, dubbed Moggmentum in imitation of Corbyn’s greater and far better supporter’s group. Mike also supports his comments with a couple of Tweets from fans, who rave about how he has ‘class’, is better than ‘left-liberal misfits who would ruin the country’, and how ‘England needs him’.

As Mike then goes on to show, Jacob Rees-Mogg is the kind of right-wing politico Britain really doesn’t need. He is, of course, Eton-educated, and as his voting record shows, he believes in punishing the poor simply for being poor, while also demanding that Tory Toffs like himself get generous state handouts to retain their position of power.

In a long list of the policies favoured by the man dubbed ‘the minister for the 18th century’, Mike shows that

He generally votes against laws to extend equality and human rights.
Consistently votes for cuts to welfare spending.
Consistently votes against gay rights.
General votes against laws to tackle climate change.
Consistently supports the extension of the surveillance state.
Consistently voted against raising support payments for the long term ill or disabled.
Consistently votes against government spending to create jobs for young people, who have been unemployed for some time.
Nearly always votes for restricting the right of EU nationals to remain in Britain.
He was also nearly always in favour of reducing access to legal aid.
He was also a solid supporter of tuition fees, the bedroom tax and against raising unemployment benefit in line with rising prices.

As Simon Renshaw says in his Tweet, which Mike has also posted in his article, Rees-Mogg is not amusing. He is cruel, deplorable and dangerous. And another Tweeter, Paul, also commented

Sperminator Rees-Mogg would not govern for the people, he would rule for his class with a selective dose of his religion thrown in.

See: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/07/07/mogg-mentum-the-tories-are-losing-their-grip-on-reality/

This last comment is extremely accurate. Rees-Mogg began his career as a politician by campaigning for the Tories in a depressed fishing area in Fife in Scotland. When asked what he would be campaigning on, Rees-Mogg declared that he would be trying to convince the locals that the country would be best served by retaining an unelected, hereditary House of Lords. Somehow, I’m not surprised he didn’t succeed on this occasion. The Scots aristocracy, led by the Duke of Buccleuch, had a greater degree of political power north of the border than their counterparts further south, until the guid Duke and his ilk were stripped of them by the Labour government in 1975. And obviously, the unkempt masses weren’t keen to bring them back. Given the spectacle of this strange, gangling figure stalking about the streets and vennels and addressing the locals in a cut-class, pukka Etonian accent, I suppose it was almost inevitable that the SNP would suddenly receive a massive boost in support. Heaven knows how he’d have got in Govan or the rougher parts of Glesgae toon.

A few years ago, Private Eye did a little feature on him as part of their series on the new boys and girls, who had entered parliament after that year’s election. Not only does Rees-Mogg expect people to defer to him because of his class, he also expects close family members to protect him personally in uncomfortable situations. By which I mean that once, at Glyndebourne, he got his nanny and his wife to hold a book over his head to protect him from the sun.

The aristocracy are also known for inflicting stupid names on their children. Rees-Mogg is no exception. Along with the normal names he has given his new-born son, Dominic and Christopher, he also inflicted ‘Sextus’ and ‘Dominic’ on the poor little mite. ‘Sextus’ is Latin for ‘Sixth’, and the little chap is his sixth sprog.

So why would anyone become a fan of this weird creature? I think part of it’s because he is so strange, as well as being personally very polite. He has a diffident, gentlemanly manner while at the same time he stands out as something of a character. He’s similar to Boris Johnson in this respect, who’s built his career on a very carefully crafted persona of being a good-natured chump, while he’s anything but in real life. Quietly spoken with a slightly diffident manner, it makes Rees-Mogg look for more harmless and reasonable than he actually is. But as his voting record shows, his political views are those of a typical vengeful Tory thug with all their class hatred and contempt for working people.

Rees-Mogg is a particular presence in my part of the world, because he’s the MP for North-East Somerset, which is just south of my bit of Bristol. I’m not surprised he got in down there. This is the same part of rural Somerset, where the Waldegrave family have their seat. There’s even a pub called ‘The Waldegrave Arms’ in Green Ore, one of the villages there on the Waldegrave estate. This is a part of Britain, where they still feel people should be tugging their forelocks in deference to the lord of the manor.

As for his supporters, from what I’ve heard personally, they’re deeply reactionary, true-blue members of the upper middle class, who really do want to drag us all back to the 19th century, when the upper classes were in power and the proles knew there place – in hovels, suffering from malnutrition and cholera.

There’s some speculation that the Tories are looking to put him into No. 10 at one point. Mike states that he’s not likely to go away, and we shall all do our best to make sure he doesn’t get in. If he does, you can bet that all the poverty, despair, joblessness and starvation the Tories have inflicted on the working class, disabled and poor in this country really will reach truly 19th century levels.

Vox Political on the Workers’ Rights at Risk if Britain Leaves Europe

Mike over at Vox Political put up an interesting piece today, reporting the findings of an employment silk, Michael Ford, QC, to the TUC on the employees’ rights that could be lost if Britain leaves the European Union. These include regulations on working time, the rights that can be transferred from one employer to another if an organisation is taken over or outsourced; protection for agency workers; the current levels of compensation paid to the victims of discrimination; and the rights of the workers’ representatives to be consulted in the case of major changes to a company, such as in the recent negotiations over the fate of British steel.

And these are not the only rights that are at risk. Other rights are also, and that those that remain may only be enforced by British courts if Britain decides to leave.

Mike also points out that depending on the British courts to help you in a legal battle over your rights with an employer won’t be much help, as Michael Gove has cut legal aid.

#EUref: Forty years of progress on rights at risk for workers if Britain Brexits

Let’s be clear about this: while many people are worried about immigration, it’s employment rights that are really at the heart of this move. The Conservatives have always hated Brussels primarily because of the social charter and the protection it gives European workers, not just because, or even necessarily primarily because they consider it a threat to British sovereignty, as expressed in books like ‘The Abolition of Britain’ and similar scaremongering nonsense. Dennis Skinner in his autobiography makes the point that there isn’t any real freedom of movement within the EU. This is shown by the imprisonment of the refugees and other unfortunates in the migrant camp at Calais. Those foreign workers, who come to Britain are brought in by the big companies through gang masters. This is an important point. Skinner makes no secret in his book that he would like Britain to leave the EU, but not because of UKIP, whom he aptly describes as ‘turbo-charged Tories’. Skinner makes a good point. However, at the moment the only people behind the campaign to take Britain out of the EU are extreme right-wing Tories like Boris, Gove and Priti Patel. All of them wish to strip British workers of the rights to have them labouring like their counterparts in the sweatshops of the Developing World. All for the profits of big business. Patel and her fellow Tories made that very clear in the book Britannia Unchained.

Don’t be taken in. Immigration is actually an irrelevant diversion to the real issues driving the Tory Brexit campaign. It’s what Farage and the rest of this gang want people to think it’s all about, while the real reason they’re promoting Brexit is to deprive us all, whether we’re Black, White, Asian, Muslim, Christian, Jew, Atheist, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish or whatever, of our employment rights under European law.

Private Eye on the Coalition’s Attempt to Make Prosecutions for Industrial Accident More Difficult

Private Eye ran this piece in their issue for 3rd – 16th May 2013. I’m fairly certain Mike over at Vox Political also covered it at the time, so its might be worth going over to his blog and looking at through the posts for that time for more information.

Insult to Injury

David Cameron won applause from the Daily Mail in January last year when he promised “to kill the health and safety culture”. Move on to Spring 2013, and we can see what his pledge means: the coalition is to slash compensation payments to injured employees and the families of dead workers, which have existed since the 19th century.

In a sly manoeuvre, the Tories and Liberal Democrats waited until their Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill had passed the scrutiny of a Commons committee, the slipped in a clause to make it harder for injured men and widowed women (or vice versa) to sue. Henceforth, the coalition told the House of Lords late at night when no one was watching, the burden of proving what caused an accident will fall on the injured worker or the family of the dead.

Peers, who have little experience of the dangers of construction, mining or hands-on agriculture, approved the measure. When the coalition abolished the Agricultural Wages Board it rigged the consultation process (Eyes passim) – but with civil liability for health and safety at work, it topped that dismal achievement and allowed no public consultation whatsoever.

Health and safety inspectors will still be able to prosecute. But as Tom Jones, of Thompsons solicitors said, there are 78,000 civil claims for compensation following accidents at work every year, but only 1,000 Health and Safety Executive (HSE) criminal prosecutions. This change will restrict enforcement in 98.7 per cent of health and safety breaches.

Thompsons represents trade unions, and its numbers may be biased, but even according to the government’s own figures, the “reform” will affect 70,000 cases a year. That’s an awful lot of dead and injured workers.

Lord Hardie, a former Lord Advocate of Scotland, told the Lords: “If this clause remains part of the bill, those who have suffered catastrophic injury, or the widows and families of employees who have been killed, will now have to depend upon state benefits for their maintenance. The financial burden will be transferred to widows, children, disabled people, and to the state. Insurance companies will be the principal beneficiaries”.

The government was not attacking some faddish, modern ‘elf and safety culture. Hardie continued, but a right to swift compensation that goes back to an 1898 court of appeal ruling in England and Wales, and an 1871 decision by Scottish judges. Since then, the law has accepted that all an employee has to prove is that they suffered in a dangerous workplace.

No more, Jones told the Eye. In the past, if you lost a hand in a piece of machinery, you only needed to show that the machine had a faulty guard. No you will have to prove that the employer knew the guard needed replacing or ought to have known. This is a much harder task, made harder still by the government’s cuts to legal aid. In future, insurance companies will be able to spin out a case until the employee’s solicitor has spent the £900 allocated to accidents at work. They will then be able to compel the worker to accept a lower settlement or nothing at all.

The Six Tories for Leaving Europe, Who’ll Make You Want to Stay In

Mike has posted up a picture on Vox Political of the grim Rogue’s Gallery of leading Tories supporting Britain leaving the EC. He refers to them as six good reasons not to vote for the Brexit. They include John Whittingdale, Theresa Villiers, Ian Duncan Smith, Chris Grayling, Michael Gove and Priti Patel. See http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/02/20/at-least-six-good-reasons-not-to-support-brexit/.

This is absolutely right, and current EU legislation at least helps keep some of their monstrous policies in check. For example, Priti ‘As a Picture’ Patel, was one of the authors of Britannia Unchained, a vile little screed which scorned British workers for being lazy, and told us all that we should work harder, for less, because that’s what people in the Third World were doing. Except that in this case, the reverse was true. The people of the Developing World were working harder, because we were. If we work fewer hours, for a bit more money, they might get a bit more too out of their employers. At the moment, British workers, as part of the EU, are guaranteed certain minimal rights under the Social Charter. Naturally, the Tories hate this with a passion. If we leave the EU, Patel and her fellow slave drivers will get their way and strip British workers of the rights and benefits we’ve built up over centuries.

Then there’s Chris Grayling. Grayling’s in charge of British justice, rapidly becoming British injustice. The Tories have set up a system of secret courts, in which you may not even know what the evidence against you or who your accuser is, if someone decides this contradicts the national interest. Grayling has cut legal aid, so that the poorest now find themselves unable to afford a solicitor. And he effectively wants to set up special prisons for political offenders, starting with Islamist terrorists.

The obstacles here are the European human rights legislation and the court of justice. The Tories have long resented these on the grounds that they protect terrorists from deportation. They don’t. They do, however, protect the human rights of EU citizens, and that’s what Grayling and the rest of the Tories want to strip from British citizens. And just remember – in the 1970s the Tories were planning internment camps for Labour MPs, the Socialist Workers, Communist Party, and leaders of youth, age and minority activist groups in the Shetland Isles. And with Grayling and Cameron planning a British gitmo for Islamists, it looks like radical Muslims aren’t going to be the only people rounded up as a threat to national security.

IDS – what can I say here? He himself is a walking indictment of the Tories. The minister for chequebook genocide has done his level best to kill, starve and impoverish the poor and disabled by cutting back on welfare support. And he’s been criticised repeatedly by international organisations. These have included the UN. Of course there’s a resentment there for the welfare provision in many EU countries, and the Social Charter. So long as we’re in the EU, there will be pressure for British workers to enjoy some of the same welfare benefits as in the other EU countries in western Europe. And this drives the Tories up the wall. They would like us to leave Europe, and become more like America, or at least the Republican version thereof, where there’s little or no welfare support.

So if you truly value the freedom, rights and welfare benefits British workers currently cling on to, vote for the ‘In’ campaign. Because if you vote with those six for leaving the EU, they will deprive you of all your rights. It’s their primary reason for wanting to leave Europe. Trade has little to do with it.

Vox Political: Corbyne Would Restore Legal Aid, Create Proper Legal System

After all the misery created by the Tories, this is a piece of very good news. And one which is probably even now frightening the Tories with the prospect that after their cuts, the proles might just be able to afford legal representation once more.

Vox Political has this report, based on the story in the Solicitor’s Journal, that Corbyn told a ‘barnstorming’ meeting of the Legal Aid Forum that he plans to restore legal aid, and create a proper legal system.
The Journal quotes him as saying

‘At the moment a lot of lawyers feel they can’t be dealing with legal aid, they have to find something else to do, hence the number of firms that don’t want to get involved in legal aid or just do commercial law because that is the only way they can make a living. It is not good for anyone. We need a proper legal system,’ said Corbyn.

‘It is a deterrent for young people going into law in the future, so we end up with young lawyers not being able to work,’ he continued. ‘If you can, stick at it. Try and stay there because people need good lawyers. They need that representation. I want to see the restoration of legal aid in the new parliament and hopefully we will have a Labour majority to bring it about.’”

From what I understand, there are a number of problems afflicting the legal profession at the moment, including a high level of graduate unemployment. I’ve been told that graduates with a legal degree must find a place in chambers within two years of graduating, otherwise their degree effectively doesn’t count, and they will never get a job as a lawyer.

One of the ways the Tories have attempted to disempower working people has been through savage cuts to legal aid, which means that many now cannot afford legal representation. All this has been done to save money and stop frivolous and ridiculous lawsuits. Of the same type, no doubt, as the ‘vexatious’ requests for information under the Freedom of Information Act, which they are also attempting to close down as a waste of public money, etc.

Medieval kings, like Henry I in the Twelfth century, liked to pose as ‘lions of justice’. Richard II even set up a new set of courts to provide cheaper justice, and therefore make legal redress more widely available. And one of the most celebrate clauses of the Magna Carta bound the Crown not to sell, delay or deny justice.

This is very good news for everyone worried about the Tories’ attack on the legal profession and the ability of ordinary people to defend themselves and their interests from injustice.

Now expect the Tories and their lapdogs in the press to start quotemining him again to try and show him as a dangerous, terrorist-loving, unpatriotic Commie.

Mike’s article is at:http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2015/11/04/labour-would-restore-legal-aid-and-a-proper-legal-system-vows-corbyn/

Vote Clegg for More Tory Government

I heard this week that Nick Clegg has said that if there is another hung parliament, he’ll talk to the Tories first about forming a coalition. If this is true, then it tells you everything you need to know about why you should not vote Lib Dem in this election.

Much of Clegg’s election campaign has been based around his statement that the Lib Dems are centrist party, and that whichever party is in power, they will restrain them from going too far.

Frankly, this is a lie. I’ve seen absolutely no evidence for this, and a lot against it. It seems the Lib Dems have enthusiastically supported all of the wicked, illiberal, punitive and destructive legislation introduced by Cameron, from the continuing piecemeal privatisation of the health service, to the establishment of secret courts, the vicious cuts to the welfare budget that are leaving people literally starving to death. Along with restrictions on the use of legal aid and the massive rise in university tuition fees.

Clegg is an ‘Orange Book’ Lib Dem. As several of the commenters have pointed out, this takes its name from the extreme laissez faire section of the 19th century Liberal Party, who rejected any kind of state intervention. The Orange Book has a chapter which recommends the privatisation of the NHS. Clegg has much in common with the Tories. So much so that they’re basically indistinguishable.

A vote for the Lib Dems under Clegg means a vote for the return of the Coalition. And that just means ‘More of the same’, in the words of the great Max Headroom. And that’s enough to give anyone a stammer, not just the computer generated.

Your Unrepresentative Representative: Esther McVie in Wirral West

Mike in his series exposing the lies, hypocrisy and sheer malignancy of Tories in marginal constituencies has also turned his attention to Esther McVey. McVey’s views and the policies she embraces are so unpleasant, that she has been dubbed ‘Fester McVile’. It seems, however, that from the number of falsehoods she has spun to justify herself and her continuing punitive attitude towards the poor and less fortunate, that she should equally be called ‘Festering Lie’. And Mike goes on to list the lies she has told.

She said it was impossible to hold a cumulative impact assessment into the effect of government welfare reforms. Untrue.

She also lied, and denied the existence of a loophole in the bedroom tax legislation that meant the government removed housing benefit from people, who were actually exempt. At least one person, Stephanie Bottrill, committed suicide because she feared she could no longer support herself because of the reduction in her benefit. She also denied she knew anything about how many people were affect by the loophole. Mike cites FoI requests that show that at least 16,000 people have been affected.

It was Mark Hoban, rather than Lie, who came out with the next whopper. He claimed that independent reviews of the work capability assessment showed that the government was working to improve it. Studies instead showed that almost 2/3 were either incompletely or inadequately put into practice.

It’s on the subject of foodbanks that she really begins to lie. She claimed that the government’s austerity programme was due to uncontrolled spending under Labour, and not from the greed and venality of out-of-control bankers. She then declared that foodbanks were Labour’s ‘nasty little secret’, until Jim Cunningham set the record straight by pointing out that under Labour they were set up to support asylum seekers awaiting decisions on their cases, and not poor citizens.

She’s repeated the lie that the Coalition came about to solve ‘the mess we’re in’, rather than as the result of a cynical political deal by two parties desperate for power. She claimed that 60,000 people would go to a foodbank in 2014. Jim Murphy pointed out that that was an underestimate. It’s the number of people in Wales, who would be forced to go to them. In 2013-14 the minimum number across Britain was 913,138.

She attacked Labour for allowing five million people to be supported on benefits for being out of work, with two million children living in families without jobs, and claimed that children were three times more likely to be in poverty if they lived in households where the parents were unemployed. Another lie. The Joseph Roundtree Foundation found the number of working households in poverty has risen to 8 million, while unemployed households in poverty is now 6.3 million.

She boasts that the Coalition has got more people into work than ever before, but doesn’t mention that this is nearly all zero-hours, part-time or self-employed contracts that deprive workers of certain basic rights and pay low wages. She claimed that the tax cuts meant families were better off by £700 per year, but in fact low wages and the cost of living means that people or £1,600 worse off.

And when you examine her voting record, it’s pretty much the same tale that emerged with Anne Soubry, Nick de Bois and Kris Hopkins: she supported the cuts to all the welfare benefits, including benefit uprating cap, and legislation making councils responsible for their citizens ability to pay council tax, while depriving them of the funds to do so. She also strongly supported the Bedroom Tax.

She’s against tax increases for the rich, wants to see corporation tax cut, and also supports increasing VAT. She is also in favour of further military action overseas, but against strengthening the military covenant. In education she support the privately run academies and free schools, voted to raise tuition fees, and end state support for 16-19 year olds in education. She also supported the privatisation of the Royal Mail and Britain’s forests, and is against localism and the devolution of further powers to local authorities. She is also in favour of deregulating gambling and allowing rail fares to rise without government restrictions. And she’s also a supporter of the piecemeal privatisation of the NHS.

She was also one of those in favour of the police and crime commissioners, the secret courts, restrictions on legal aid, and the expansion of government surveillance. She doesn’t support equal rights for gays and same-sex marriages. She’s also voted both for and against a referendum on Britain’s EU membership.

Mike’s article begins:

There is little that this blog can add to the litany of outrage against the woman who has been dubbed ‘Fester McVile’ by commentators who are feeling kind towards her.

In a previous column, this blog stated that the employment minister, who works under Iain Duncan Smith, “has accumulated a reputation so bad that the only way she can hide the metaphorical stink from the public is by associating with …Smith himself, in whose stench she seems almost fragrant. But not quite”. How accurate those words are.

This is a woman who has lied to the public that it is impossible to carry out a cumulative assessment of the impact on the sick and disabled of the Coalition’s ‘final solution’ changes to the benefit system.

This is the woman who, in the face of public unrest about the prevalence of zero-hours contracts, announced that Job Centre advisors will now be able to force the unemployed into taking this exploitative work.

She has previously misled Parliament over the loophole in Bedroom Tax legislation that meant the government had removed Housing Benefit from thousands of people who were exempt from the measure – including Stephanie Bottrill, whose suicide has been attributed to the pressure of having to survive on less because of the tax. Asked how many people had been affected by the loophole, McVey played it down by claiming she did not know the answer, while other ministers suggested between 3,000 and 5,000. In fact, from Freedom of Information requests to which just one-third of councils responded, 16,000 cases were revealed. Esther McVey is a very strong supporter of the Bedroom Tax.

Mark Hoban stood in for McVey to trot out the lie that independent reviews of the Work Capability Assessment had identified areas of improvement on which the government was acting. In fact, out of 25 recommendations in the Year One review alone, almost two-thirds were not fully and successfully implemented.

Mike’s article is at http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2015/03/24/will-wirral-west-divest-itself-of-esther-mcvey/

Read it and decide for yourself if this is a woman, who should be anyway near power and public authority.