Category: Police

Brittania, Chained: What else must be taken from us before we rise up?

By Daviemoo

Striking and protesting are not primary actions. One does not ask to finish half an hour early then strike when told “no” any more than one immediately takes to the streets when bills begin to rocket up in price. These are desperate actions, taken as a last resort to call heed to the wider powers of the country that a problem unsolvable by workers, or the public as a whole, exists.

For too long now, the British public has been misled by the twin arms of an utterly ineffectual  government and a media machine desperate to spin a gaudy narrative of lazy workers wanting more for less. Glaring headlines shared by Conservative MPs declare that Britain has become a “something for nothing” state- and yet an anonymous healthcare worker striking outside Leeds General Infirmary recently told me “some days it’s like coming in to a hospital in the trenches- I’m not striking because I enjoy it, I’m striking because- whether we’re there or not- it’s not safe for patients OR for staff”. When I spoke to a striking rail worker outside Leeds train station a few weeks ago I was told “my life is practically over. My mortgage went up, my electric and gas went up, my food bills are up, my wife is sick- Whether I strike or not I cant afford to live”.

Striking has long been a fundamental right of workers, but this right has been restricted and squeezed continuously since the dark days of the winter of discontent. In 1980 Thatcher passed anti “sympathy strikes” legislation, halting any wider spread of striking. Balloting was enforced, and the time between ballot and response was decreased from seven days to five whilst postal balloting was also introduced- not only did this involve increased cost, but it also meant determined organisation was required in order to even question adequately the workforce involved in the ballot and even these subversive moves were only the quieter actions laid by Thatcher to suppress strike action.

Unfortunately, the previous labour administration did little to remove restrictions on protest. Blair was reportedly focused more on drilling down on the economy and bringing in results, believing it was unnecessary to scrap the anti protest legislation in favour of simply working constructively to address issues which would prompt strikes.

Prime Minister Sunak’s desperation to enforce legislation around striking which guarantees a “minimum service level” is wholly ironic: minimum service levels are not being met at present, even on non-strike days. When I was thirteen I broke my wrist, and I thought the four hour wait in A&E before I was given a cast was exorbitant: now, 36 hour waits in A&E are the norm: people die waiting for ambulances to arrive or inside of them as they queue for triage outside departments crowded to bursting and understaffed.
These issues long predate the pandemic- an NHS staffing crisis has been ongoing for so long that I do not believe we’ve seen normal staffing levels since 2010 at best.  

Having worked as a recruiter for the NHS directly for two years, I remember being given the amended pay scale one day and being agog: a fully trained, fully qualified consultant earned just over £100,000 at the time. People will, of course, say this is a high salary- and yet I am willing to bet that those complaining do not have to pay hundreds of pounds for indemnity insurance a year, hundreds of pounds for GMC registration, for parking, for a mortgage within an appropriate distance from the hospital in case they are summoned for an emergency. Those who quickly complain that NHS staff salaries are high too often fail to factor in the huge amount of money doctors and nurses must spend in order to simply progress in their careers. 

That pay scale has barely changed since 2016 when I left the NHS’ employ and yet, due to governmental mediocrity we have seen an unprecedented rise in everything we are required to spend on: mortgage and rent have spiralled, uncontrolled bill growth continues, in Labour run councils council tax is the only means of funding as it is widely suggested that the conservatives throttle funding, so council tax bills rise and, of course, the very goods we buy- food, clothing, sanitary products- have continued to grow exponentially in prices.
The malfeasance of Truss and Kwarteng led to a fiscal black hole, into which fell the dreams of many- home ownership, reasonable rental prices and more back breaking fiscal requirements fell like lead weights on the shoulders of the British public. 

How does the government respond to this shocking burden to taxpayers? By passing legislation preventing us from complaining about it. 

But it is not merely workers rights being throttled by the hand of a malfeasant government- the very public’s voice is being smothered under a legislative deluge started by ex Home Secretary, Priti Patel and continued by her contemporary, Suella Braverman. 

Patel passed the Police, Crime, Courts and Sentencing Bill, which was given Royal Assent on 28th April 2022. The bill focused on ensuring the police were given further powers through robust expanse of the “unacceptable protests” clause: a deeply problematic clause which was questioned by many a “lefty lawyer”- for what is an “unacceptable” protest?
The act also endowed the Home Secretary with the power to make regulations without having to defer to parliament, essentially widening the scope for prosecution, criminalisation and eschewing responsibility that usually sits in hand with the person in the Home Secretary chair. 

Under the PCCSB, you could be charged as a “public nuisance” if your protests were “noisy or disruptive”- unlike those very useful quiet and non disruptive protests we hear of so often in the history books.

As the bill moved through the house of lords, huge sections were excised, deemed too extreme and draconian. Braverman, unable perhaps to create and implement her own legislation, swept the offcuts of this bill up, waited for the PCCSB to pass royal assent, took over from Patel then (ignoring the brief period where she stepped down in disgrace for leaking confidential information), used the new powers included in the primary bill to pass the offcuts unopposed under the Public Order bill.

The Public Order bill essentially criminalises the act of even attending protests- those who have attended protests within five years can be compelled legally to “check in” their nonattendance at subsequent protests and can even be legally barred from referencing or speaking about protests which others may attend on social media, thereby disrupting the possibility of encouraging active participation in protest. Braverman also has the power to give injunctions to those “likely” to protest- and yet the regular crowd of free speech advocates who go to pains to defend peoples’ rights to speak out are suspiciously quiet on this. 

Garden Court North chambers had this to say on the Public Order bill:

The right to protest is at the heart of all of the hard-won rights that we enjoy in our democratic society. The Public Order Bill 2022 presents a grave threat to that right and would mark a regressive shift of power away from ordinary people and towards the State.

Not content with stripping protest rights back to the bare sinew, Sunak is now passing legislation so restrictive it even prevents “slow march” protests, where protestors walk slowly in the streets to disrupt traffic.

The overarching question which the wider public should be asking is this: would a government interested in solving problems also actively garrotte the publics’ methods of speaking out about them?

A well run country does not need to pass anti protest and anti strike legislation, because governments which drive results and correct issues are curing the diseases of which strikes and protests are a symptom. One begins to suspect that the disease from which these symptoms emanate is, in fact, a government embroiled in scandal after scandal- from Sunak’s second FPN of his public tenure to Braverman’s lazy dismissal of a holocaust survivor’s warning of her rhetoric, on to Zahawi’s tax affairs which saw him removed in shame- ironic, given Sunak’s taxation snafu over non-do status, or even to the fresh sleaze revelations of Johnson’s securing up to £800,000 loan by a friend he then appointed to a key BBC position and a distant cousin at the bank. We sometimes do not know where to turn in the U.K. because at every juncture lies further injustice, further malfeasance and stricter repercussions for not simply “making the best of a bad situation”.

The normalisation of “suffering for Britishness” is an odd phenomenon, reminiscent of the frog in the slowly heating pan. The citizens of the United Kingdom do not realise that we are, or deserve to, slowly boil in the swamp of corruption pouring steadily from Westminster, subsuming the country and winding us inextricably into the corruption the tories have solidified- and until the British and in particular the English become aware of the steady heat rising around us, we will continue to be scalded by the bad actors who stack the cabinet.

Additionally one must take into account a third arm of state machinery- the police force.
The police are an arm of control the government has been all too willing to use at their discretion, creating the bills mentioned above under Patel and Braverman to restrict our rights. The police force continues to be assailed daily by the excoriating light of truth- police are outed as rapists, racists and bigots, all leading to more state protection through watery statements from Braverman and other officials, or by promises of reform which still does not improve the ramshackle-state of either trust in the police, or the actions of them.
The police are the physical clenched fist of the state, the government it’s rotting brains, the media it’s fork tongued mouth and with these three pillars in place, we fail to be the country we can be, we fail to keep the rights we deserve and we continue to be pinned supine under the conservatives.
A government who takes these radical actions is not a government who will address the root causes- so one must then ask whether a cabinet uninterested in fixing the issues of a divided, exhausted country is a cabinet rotten to the core… and in need of replacement. 

The cruelty is the point

By Daviemoo

I’m constantly moved by those who fail to realise the ethos of the tory party: one of their many monikers is literally “the nasty party” and it’s not just because a worrying number of MPs look like the recently reanimated.

Look at the faces of the tory party: Patel, implicated in a bullying scandal so severe that the UK taxpayer fronted a settlement with an ex employee, Braverman who dreams of sending desperate refugees to Rwanda, Williamson who thinks helping someone in debt means he “owns” them, Gullis who happily screamed and jeered in parliament in support of a PM who threw back libation whilst we were legally secluded, Rob Roberts, suspended for a month for being sexually inappropriate with staff (and by all accounts trying to do so with constituents, sending out letters asking for pretty young female constituents to visit him privately) and of course the tory MP who we all know is a rapist but can’t name for fear of jeopardising his case and letting him off the hook: and of course the face of the party for nearly two disastrous years, Boris “beat up a journalist letterboxes bum boys let the bodies pile high” Johnson.
We have to get over this obsession with the idea that the tories are tough but fair- I know, I know in my heart that tory voters believe this somehow- that they think the tories are the party of “we’re doing this for your own good” but it’s not the “we’re taking the hard decisions to improve your lives in the long run”, it’s more akin to “you’re making me hit you because you won’t just lie down and take it”.

The tories have pushed through legislation after legislation to hurt the British people- not just the opposition, though the way the tories are stirring up hate against those who disagree with them is indicative of that- but the actual British people. I often have people tell me they think the voter ID bill is good, after all it’ll stop voter fraud: ah yes, just like how anti speeding laws stop speeding, how anti drug laws stop drugs and anti homeless bills make homeless people have homes!
Voter ID laws disenfranchise people: at last count, 2.5 million people will be disenfranchised from their ability to vote in the next election and 2.5 million people is more than enough to sway politics in a direction the country doesn’t want. Fortunately initiatives LIKE THIS (spread the word, share widely) help us to somewhat combat voter disenfranchisement, but we can never recapture all the voices who are silenced by insidious moves like this by the government to control the voting narrative. I’ve said before, the people most likely to be affected by voter disenfranchisement are the poor, the disabled and the young- all demographics who certainly don’t vote for tories in huge numbers: what an odd coincidence, I’m sure.

Then of course we had the police, crime, courts and sentencing bill, a bill that said “protest away! Just make sure you have the assent of the local police force”. The local police force who did stuff like this before the bill was even passed:

And a bill that said “unauthorised” protests, even one man protests, could result in imprisonment. The wooly language of the bill, no doubt in part due to its writing by Patel who was trying her best not to slip into plagiarising Mein Kampf, was so wooly that we still don’t know what an “unauthorised” protest looks like- mayhaps we’ll see a wealth of protest insurance companies pop up, ready to give you indemnity against all the eye gouges, pepper sprays and shield injuries you can muster?

But they weren’t done, were they? No, we thought Patel, the grand high bitch was bad enough but they managed to improve on that formula and go from fascist lite to fascist with Suella Braverman. Braverman has crafted a new bill which functionally criminalises you if you’ve ever gone to a protest- even a peaceful one. Braverman wants to electronically tag people who have been to protests and control their ability to even speak about protests online- that seems like pretty abrasive moves to control speech from a woman who is also encouraging the police to allow hate crimes against LGBT+ people.
Braverman is trying to imprison four people for tearing down a statue of a slaver: said slaver, were he alive today, would think nothing of seeing Braverman chained by the neck and forced to clean his floors, and she’s simply slavering at the idea of defending his honour over asking whether the British people might not want to lionise figures who killed 15,000 black people (and fyi that is just those who died during travel) by chaining them up, ripping them away from their homelands and forcing them to work for snooty Brits. Remember, the tories leaned hard for years on “the will of the people” as their catchphrase for everything and yet if you asked the British people if we wanted statues of arseholes like Colston around, I suspect the answer might be now. They say it’s part of our cultural heritage and yet they’re deathly afraid to teach us what slavers did- raping black slaves, allowing the mutilation of innocent people for our convenience: what a strange dichotomy to want these people’s faces in public to celebrate, rather than to disturb and warn us never to become so heartless again.

All of this leads us to a very simple conclusion: the tory party are total cunts. The will, of course, say that they’re doing these things for our good… what good? To stop the “just stop oil” folks? They might be delaying trucks from dispensing the goods that finally manage to run the self imposed slalom from the EU to here, but considering there’s a widespread medicine shortage that isn’t being reported on I’m about 99% convinced that four teens and three old people glued to a road in Middleton for three hours isn’t the cause. And people ask, “why don’t they do something more radical?!”.
Did you know a climate scientist self immolated (for those who don’t like fancy words, that means set fire to himself) and it was barely a blink in the eye of the public. The only time people paid attention was when a painting got some soup thrown on it for fucks sake; people are more bothered about Campbells on a wall than they are about someone literally roasting themselves to death: what a sad little life we all live together Jane.
The tories aren’t trying to stop people gluing themselves to roads or wasting a tin of Heinz cream of tomato: they’re trying to forestall the true dissent they know is coming because of years of their shit leadership. This isn’t about letting us “get on” because if it was, you’d think they would sit down with rail execs, nurses, postage staff, university staff, doctors and everyone else who is striking and actually iron out the problems. And I don’t want to “get on” with it any more! I want the problems to be fixed, not plastered over with posters akin to Enoch Powell’s rivers of blood in 240 twitter characters.

The tories are meant to be cruel- they don’t do it to help people, it isn’t tough love. It’s a distraction technique, a handful of dirt in the face of an outraged camper. They throw distractions at you to make sure you don’t focus upon the obvious: that things are bad when they are in charge.
They could easily do all the things they promise- roll back trans rights, stop people boating here, but they don’t, or they do the bare minimum and why? Because when trans people have no rights and no boats land here and your life still sucks, you just might realise that the real problem is them.

The other day I was walking along the Headrow in Leeds and outside one of the pubs I walked past a guy who said “what we need right- Australia: they have it right, shut our borders yeah”. Every part of me wanted to argue with him (Bet you were pissed off when they stopped Djokovic from coming in due to his vaccination status eh) but why bother? There are so many people convinced, utterly sure that migrants are the problem here, that those nasty foreigners darkening our doorstep are the issue.

How many foreigners voted to dump raw sewage into our rivers? How many trans people voted not to feed school kids, or make sure our pay goes up in line with inflation? How many gay people protect a man who quaffed champagne whilst our loved ones died, or back a woman whose idiotic decisions tanked the economy to unprecedented levels? How many people who arrived on boats liked the eat out to help out scheme which may have seeded coronavirus all around the country and contributed to more deaths? And how many of these people who sneak into our beloved country cost us as much as people bathed in wealth who pay less than their fair share as we get taxed more and more?

Migrants are not the cause of your shit life- your voting choices are, your desperate need to back people in charcoal suits with the right accent, the right haircut, the right demeanour because that’s what you think politics are. So many people are determined to see people like me, tattooed and pierced and extolling the virtues of maybe trying a different way after years of this one not working, as the enemy. You’re more scared of the word socialism than you are losing your houses to overinflated mortgage prices, mortgages you worked for years and sacrificed to save for if your avocado toast slander is to be believed. And you’re so angry at the benefit claimants you never once consider that there but for the grace of god goes you! I’ve claimed benefits, because I had two jobs- one working as an admin for a recruitment company, one in a bar- the recruitment company shut down (and didn’t pay me my last month’s salary by the way- I had to sue my own money out of them) and the bar decided to downsize its staff and I was new. Benefits saved me from literal starvation and I was treated like dirt because I was on them- IN THE MIDDLE OF THE 2010 RECESSION!

The tory party are still, somehow, perceived as the party of necessary evil and they aren’t.
One thing I can’t stand is the way Labour are desperately chasing the voters who love that side of the tory party. Starmer isn’t wrong that we have an over-reliance on immigration for short term staffing- but immigration itself is not a bad thing, and why it’s seen as such is beyond me. Having a country thats services- from coffee shops to the NHS – are staffed well, means we don’t have to scrape for every job going, should mean that money is flowing in a well regulated economy and therefore we can fund education better, giving better opportunities to British born people. This weirdness when it comes to migrant slander has to stop on both sides because it’s not true and it’s not sexy to blame some unnamed, faceless foreigner for our failings to prepare for anything. Operation Cygnus was ignored by successive health secretaries and would have made a huge difference during the pandemic and instead- here we are, 200,000 dead people and over 1.5 million long covid sufferers later and the most the government and the opposition can do is go “but migrants tho”.

We don’t need political parties in charge that cater to the wet dreams of racists, or to the entitled views of people who think benefits exist to do anything other than support people in unfortunate situations: and of course there will be those happy to subsist rather than exist- but blaming them for the system misses the entire point that the system exists with those loopholes built in.

I don’t want the nasty party in charge. They’ve had very nearly thirteen years now and what have we seen? Societal divide and decline, increased poverty rates, food bank usage shot up by 14% in a YEAR, shortened lifespan and lower quality of life, less rights.
We need alternatives, and as my good friend Dr Maria Norris said, we need to rely on hope, not fear. Fearing migrants isn’t solving a problem, it’s assigning it to something. And no migrant ever voted to restrict your freedom.

Embracing the different is what strengthens us – the way iron itself is more fragile than steel, drawing in disparate elements creates strength and this too is true of society. I don’t care about where you were put on this earth by your mother, whether you’re gay, if you want to transition to another gender: I care about your values and your willingness to leave the world better than you came into it. This isn’t a shallow fight for who can hoard the most resources to their chest, it’s not a game of who can get the most stuff- we all end up hollow corpses or piles of dust, but what’s important is making sure we leave the world better than we found it, that we eliminate the struggles we faced for the next group of people for whom fate aligns to put them here. And to do that, it’s true folly to look at this country as ending where the seas begin and to think that simply being born here means you’re better than those who weren’t. From the devices you type your angry messages on to the surgeons who remove your tumour, nationality is not relevant as much as intent and prowess: and that doesn’t come stamped on your rear like three lions or a white and red cross.

If you want to improve your country, start at its power center, start with the government and work outwards and perhaps, when you get to the borders, you will realise that the invasion was always coming from within.

“God (that you don’t believe in) save the King (that you don’t support) in helping the Government (that 56% of you didn’t vote for)”

By Daviemoo

Truss has had months to prepare for recession, the energy crisis, the cost of living crisis and any other issues headed our way. But empty pageantry, infighting and a desperation to squeeze her neck into the leash of “the donors” has led us to where we always knew we would be- rule by a party who looks after the rich on the credit card of the poor. The hypocrisy is layered deep in the UK status quo: but what is true patriotism if not the antithesis of what we are fed by media and deranged thoughtless reactionaries, and how do we seize this true patriotism, pass it through the bars of our prison and lead ourselves through revolution into the UK we need- not the UK we have?

Governmental ineptitude at your expense

Liz Truss has never met a moral she can’t ignore. From a republican to speaking at the Queen’s funeral, Lib Dem to leader of the Conservative party and from staunch remainer to helming a country so battered by the trifecta of Brexit, Covid and lacklustre leadership we’re slipping past some eurozone countries in regards to quality of living. Truss has already demonstrated clearly to us that she intends to do nothing to assist in the living conditions of the downtrodden but will pull out all the stops to bolster the supports holding we, the underclass, under our supposed betters.

Unfortunately for Ms. Truss, that nebulous descriptor, “poor” continues to expand, as more British households slip into poorness, poverty and desperation due to the economic malfunctions of a government long off the rails. Truss has created an energy plan that pushes the crisis further down the ways, all (naturally) to the expense of the British tax payer. Her economic taxation will save the poorest households less than one pound a month, whilst benefitting the already wealthy: but did we honestly expect some subversion of the Truss we’ve always seen when she has so readily shown us who she is and how she acts so many times before?
She describes herself as a “no nonsense northern straight talker”. One suspects that a no nonsense straight talker would have told the companies that have turned unfathomable profit into CEO salary instead of investment into green energy, onshore wind farms, more efficient forms of energy capture- that these failures couldn’t stand, and would have begun implementing hefty reforms on the businesses operating here.
Truss eats out of the hands of these companies not just because she used to be in the upper echelon of Shell, but because these companies throw money at her party in return for their servile response to this energy crisis. It’s like asking your boss to tell the CEO to close their office door when they’re insulting the HR team: it won’t happen.

One must remember that the conservatives who have been in power for almost 13 years have faced a steady stream of reminders from a nonpartisan group of government ministers since 2012 that an energy crisis was looming because the UK had no onshore infrastructure which needed to be addressed: was it? Absolutely not- the flat ignoring of this long-looming crisis has meant that energy infrastructure actually plateaued, with only minor changes made, surface changes which impacted nothing. Additionally, the installation of Truss who is apparently moved to the approximation of teary eyes by seeing solar panels has meant that any government schemes to incentivise businesses to pursue green energy infrastructure are dead in the water- water that is now being filled with sewage, because of course it is.

Broader than this though, the cost of living crisis hangs over us like the clouds we Brits are so used to. And what are the government doing to ensure that we don’t drown in debt just so we can purchase butter for our crumpets? Why, making sure that bankers’ earning potential is uncapped of course!

If the almost immediate move to deregulate bankers bonuses did not plainly show where this government’s interests lie, what does? I, and I’m sure most people reading this, don’t care about bankers bonuses in any way more than wondering why they can have unlimited earning potential when we have empirical evidence of how badly that works for the economy: I give it less than a decade until a harangued and as yet faceless PM (it won’t be Truss) pops up on tv to tell us that we’re not only giving energy companies our money to float their businesses but we’re going to do the merry go round of paying bankers another set of bailouts.

But isn’t this all just the milieu of Britishness now? It feels like we’re a nation of the abused, sat stirring a cup of tea quietly, terrified that we might accidentally tap the side of the cup with the spoon and bring down on us the ire of our betters, be they crown wearing, crown serving or supposedly the businesses that work for us. It won’t be long until the UK’s energy companies take the line of South Africa’s main energy supplier, “load shedding” IE shutting down the national grid for hours at a time whilst admonishing us silly, selfish proles for daring to use the energy that we literally pay for.

And as if having a government of openly hostile, privately-but-not-well-educated bad faithers strutting the halls of our parliament wasn’t bad enough, watching the collective St Vitas’ Dance madness unfold around the death of Queen Elizabeth has been absolutely flabbergasting. However you feel about the royals, and you have a right to feel however you want, the reaction from the British working class has been galling to the point of making me wonder if I should simply delete my social media, the blog, the podcast and just give it up as a bad job. From people wearing cardigans daubed with union jacks saying that “proper British” people accept “the way of things” to watching working class people confirm that yes people SHOULD be arrested and in fact should go to PRISON for being critical of the monarchy, I’ve sworn at my various screens more times in the last month than in the last 6 combined, and that’s quite a feat considering Johnson was still our PM a few months ago.

British people are suffering from a collective Stockholm syndrome. Ruled over by hopelessly distant elites who use their paid shills to tell us over and over that we want it to be like this: innumerable people fit into the openly visible underclass of the UK. We’ll soon have no working time directive to protect us from unreasonable demands from our workplaces, implanted no less by a government who partied during the biggest health crisis the UK has seen in over 100 years, had 3.5 months in meltdown, came back for a week, took 10 days off for the death of the monarch, will go back for 2 days, then will be off until OCTOBER- but don’t forget, little workers, you’re amongst the laziest people Dominic Raab AND our new PM Liz Truss has ever seen. Truss made this comparison against China, and the reason we may be lazier than Chinese workers is probably because in China an errant word against the government can have you arrested. Just a thought.
Moving to the royals: the mere acceptance of a monarchy is to accept that there are greater and lesser humans. To believe that a god chose and beatified a human to raise a lineage of those with inconceivable wealth and power to rule over a land, free of election, free of discussion. The UK collectively allows itself to be held prisoner- and why? Because of the most infuriating adage in the British language: “we’ve always done it that way”. Tradition does not obfuscate the need to question whether, at the start of a cost of living crisis announcement, we watched our now king sit atop a golden throne next to a stolen jewel worth millions in a palace worth hundreds of millions as he told us we were in for a difficult time. If people feel so collectively strongly about the monarchy, put it to a vote! Why are you afraid of reaffirming the nation wants a monarch? And why, in particular, are you afraid of people like me? It’s not like I’ve made a habit of being on the winning side is it? I backed Corbyn, I voted against Brexit, I called for an election when Johnson was finally put to the governmental sword… I’m sure we’d vote overwhelmingly to keep the monarchy but at least we were asked.

Apparently patriotic behaviour is accepting the collective delusion of a nation filled with people who, a year ago, swore that wearing a mask for 37 seconds to buy a 20 pack of Marlboro lights was the equivalent of the subversion of bodily autonomy suddenly deciding that it’s ok to tase people who aren’t openly weeping about the death of a total stranger.

But what IS patriotism?


Patriotism is, shockingly, not the concept that we must unblinkingly accept the foetid corruption of a government determined to undermine those who disagree with it, by stripping back the right to protest. Patriotism isn’t being forced by violence and with threats of police retribution to suddenly give fealty to a man who was hated for his mistreatment of his wife when I was ten years old. Patriotism is not waving union jacks in the streets of a country failing it’s citizens so badly that we went from 35 Trussell Trust food banks in 2010 to having 11,650 by 2020. Patriotism is not the calm and certain acceptance that people awaiting cancer treatment were at risk of, and in fact suffering from, the loss of their booked appointment because of a funeral, a funeral which you were compelled like worker ants to imbibe by the removal of any other avenue instead: shops shut, gyms shut, libraries, museums shut… you will mourn: or else.

Layer upon layer of injustice is spread like a permafrost across the UK: a government who continually prioritises the rich few over the poor many, and then with no hint of irony talks about not pandering to minorities… A media who blithely behaves to the antithesis of how media should act, ratifying the lies and missteps of the government, the police, the royals – its own self…

The UK has fallen so far from where I hoped it would be. And yet I, we, fight on. We endure the insults, the degradation, the threats and the infighting, we read and write about how things can be, could be, should be, will be better for people who go out of their way to insult and malign us. We steel ourselves for abuse every time we press “send” on a message- but why? Because despite it all the gossamer thin but steel strong strands of hope run through us: hope that we can reach someone out there who feels similarly and make them keep fighting. Hope that we can reaffirm those beaten down by these injustices that things can and will be better. Hope that those disaffected by the nonsense and noise will rise up with us and fight to improve the status quo.
That- this- these actions, this is patriotism. It’s not the gormless acceptance of a country and state that have failed us for so long in so many ways, it’s the razor sharp and endless conviction that we can, that we will win and that in this victory we will seek a better country and a better future for ourselves and even for those who may not deserve it after aligning themselves with the forces who worked to derail this change.

I know- not think, I know that we can make a difference. That we can change the direction we’re headed. But all hands on deck, people. Things aren’t working, things aren’t improving because not enough of us are willing to throw our weight into it. The tories call us lazy, but laziness is letting the country sink. So gird your loins, wrap your hands in the work ahead and repeat this phrase that I have imbibed on my heart

We Deserve Better.

Daviemoo is a 34 year old independent writer, radicalised into blogging about the political state of the world by Brexit and the election of serial failures like Trump and Johnson. Please check out the rest of the blog, check out Politically Enraged, the podcast available on all streaming platforms and share with your like minded friends! Also check him out on ko-fi where you can keep him caffeinated whilst he writes.

Britain is Authoritarian: we didn’t kill the bill & now democracy is dead

By Daviemoo

It’s been coming for a long time now, with klaxon warnings from scholars and activists all over the world. But today the United Kingdom truly embraced its role as an authoritarian state as the house of lords voted for the police, crime, courts and sentencing bill to effectively curtail our human right to protest. Those who endorse the bill will tell you that it is not stopping protest, only engendering co-operation with the police and asking that protests- mass gatherings of people- do not “disturb the peace”.
There is no peace, there is no, there is no democracy- in a country who throttles the voice of its citizens.

It’s hard to know where to start with the bill which Priti Patel has fought so hard to implement and my problems with it. Firstly a Home Secretary who was forced to resign for attending unauthorised meetings with foreign powers making decisions on legalities seems a far stretch: secondly, legislation written by a woman who erroneously said the death penalty is effective even in spite of evidence it is not.
The met police have voiced their own displeasure of Patel’s draconian oversight of their duties- but the met hardly have room to comment on poor leadership, or indeed of behaviours beyond the pale, including current accusations of a cover-up around partygate.
Patel has long disparaged actual champions of what right wing figures like herself so often champion as free speech- she is yet to apologise for speaking out against “lefty lawyers” which led to a knife attack against legal experts who work for human rights campaigns. And here is the strongest evidence yet in the damning indictment in the public eye that Patel does not seek to defend free speech, only speech she condones: the effective strangulation of protest rights in the United Kingdom.

Many of those who will clap like seals for this bill have spent time in the press decrying the restrictive regimes of China or Russia- we have watched, agog, footage of Russian people being arrested under similar laws for holding up blank pieces of paper. Once this law passes, the people of China would technically have an easier time of protesting than Britain- because even one man protests can now be punished with a custodial sentence.

It appears that protest will only be acceptable if the local police assent to a demonstration- and protests can be dismantled, including using police violence and arrests for protests which “disturb the public” or people “find intimidating”: and this, we can fairly conclude, proves that every single person who voted for this bill has never had to protest for their own rights or the rights of those they love- that they do not understand the essence of protest is to foreshadow civil upheaval should the voices of those protesting not be heard in peace.

Additionally, those who do attend protests face arrest with custodial sentences lasting years- for protesting against what they see as unfair, undue or dangerous legislative or public moves by the UK government.

The highest irony in all of this comes in many different flavours: the indifferent silence of the anti lockdown protestors who proudly marched gormlessly around London propagating a virus that is still killing over 1000 people a week. The confused smiles of people vox popped in the streets who didn’t even know this was happening and are entitled enough to know they will never NEED the right to protest because they are unaware that their lot in life could be better should they simply rise up- or the ever increasing frustration of activists who have worked increasingly hard to highlight the undue, unfair- unnecessary bill in its entirety. The entire UK seems to have entered into some collective malaise, with only the enraged detritus of we few, the minorities working hard to retain their own rights and safety or the few politically savvy people who are aware of the appalling nature of this bill fighting against it.
Violence was, more than once, used against peaceful protestors in Bristol, London, Manchester who simply wanted to ensure we retain our human right- it is a human right- to protest: yet swathes of football fans wrecked town centres and businesses, broke into stadiums with seeming impunity from police- because in the United Kingdom now it is seen as more dangerous to stand peacefully with signs of protest than it is to throw security staff to the floor and barge, unchecked into a stadium to watch a sports game. During the BLM protests, police hovered at the edges of the protests, hands on batons threateningly as though those desperate to be heard about civil injustices caused by the police themselves would be as great of a danger as angry ignorant people desperate to protect statues over human life and liberty.

The United Kingdom will continue its decline under fascist-leaning leadership like Patel and Johnson, under the baleful glare of politicians like Dominic Raab who wish to scrap the human rights act, along with institutionally corrupt pillars of societal maintenance like the met or the media who hide their collaboration with anti trans screeds, allow lesbian rapists to suggest murdering trans people and who have set us on course to continue to see our rights, our quality of living and indeed out liberty continue to dissipate in favour of a society only extant to keep the rich in money as we squabble- now quietly in fear of upsetting the peace- for what little dignity the tories care to afford us.

Ultimately the passing of this bill into law is a mistake which will cost not only the British public greatly, but the authoritarians in chief.
When you functionally illegalise peaceful protest, you take that avenue away yes- but not the need for it. People still want to, need to, are forced to protest for their liberties and against their injustices. Making peaceful protest as harshly punishable as violent protest leaves those of us who need protest as an avenue to start to make decisions we did not need before: firstly, can we be heard outside of protesting – and if so, how?
Secondly if protesting is our only means of being heard and it is now as harshly punished to be heard peacefully as it is to be more radical, do we choose the peaceful option and face punishment- or do we choose violence knowing that it may be the only way to be heard? This isn’t a decision any activist wants to make and the idea of having to harness violence to enact public change is truly a move for the desperate- but is that not where we are now under a government who blanket refuses to listen to the will of the people they so often expound upon?

Patel, Johnson, Raab- the tories continue to bind our hands and expect us to remain compliant but as our streams of expression for our displeasure evaporate before us the time is at hand to ask: if we can’t be heard peacefully, are our options truly as limited now as compliance, silence… or violence?

Daviemoo is a 34 year old independent writer, radicalised into blogging about the political state of the world by Brexit and the election of serial failures like Trump and Johnson. Please check out the rest of the blog, check out Politically Enraged, the podcast available on all streaming platforms and share with your like minded friends! Also check him out on ko-fi where you can keep him caffeinated whilst he writes.

The Party is Over: The Tory Party, That is.

By Daviemoo

The British public faces a stark choice: to continue to enable and embolden a wholesale corrupt political party, or to shake up a system that has failed us repeatedly over the last decade. As pressure mounts on Johnson to resign and a report by one of his employees is awaited, the question has shifted from “will Johnson step down” to “will the British public continue to be a doormat for the Etonian elite”?

Prime Minister Boris Johnson stands accused of lassitude, corruption and collusion in not only partaking in parties when the nation was on strict lockdown, but in engendering an attitude of utter Devil-May-Care wankery in the walls of our most respected institution of Great British Governance. True to form, Nadine Dorries took a running leap at a Sky News microphone to defend professional alcoholic and philanderer Boris Johnson this week ahead of yet more party allegations. She told us that we should accept the disgraced Prime Minister’s “fulsome apology”. Here, incidentally, is the dictionary definition of “fulsome”:

Nadine Dorries reportedly once stood near a dictionary

Unsurprisingly it was a matter of 37 minutes between me watching this interview with Dorries and with the breaking news of two more unsanctioned Downing Street carnivales. Angela Eagle, in PMQ’s on Wednesday, asked whether it might be appropriate to investigate the days parties DIDN’T happen in downing street as the number of known illegal or at least horribly ill advised gatherings numbers thirteen- as much as Eagle meant this as a joke, it may actually be taken as a collaborative suggestion for expedience from the opposition to assist Johnson’s employee, Sue Grey, in her report on what appears to have been a two year long Oktoberfest in the walls of Downing Street.

Like Michael Gove, perhaps we should all be drawing a line somewhere- and like Gove perhaps it’s related to the Westminster toilets- his location of choice, and the current location of the Tory party’s moral standing.

The incarnated marionette that is Jacob Rees-Mogg lost no time in disparaging fellow tory party members to curry favour with everyone’s favourite scruffy haired scrounger-in-chief, insulting Douglas Ross, one of over 30 Scottish tories, whose tartan pattern is simply the sad face emoji. Weak and ineffectual Ross may be, but for once he is genuinely interested in the good of country, party and nation by calling for the resignation of Crime Sinister Johnson for his piss-taking parties.

And back to Dorries, she defended the most tepid tweet of prime ministerial defence from chancellor and all around rich boy Rishi Sunak, saying he was absent in defending the prime minister because he was in Dorset and “there’s no wifi in Dorset”. Dorries apparently mistakes Dorset for a concrete and steel box sunk forty feet beneath the earth – or perhaps this is a tacit confession that Sunak is an anti vaxxer and therefore doesn’t have access to the magic 5G properties of a nice dose of moderna.

And then we look to Michael Fabricant- at least, in his capacity as MP and not in his second job as wig stand for H&M’s mannequins, desperate to split hairs – theoretical ones, much like his own head hair- over whether the laws were indeed broken. The fact that the court of public opinion doesn’t even need consultation because the prime minister himself has said it was a party and he did attend – and yet we’re being asked to both congratulate him on the bodies piled high and simultaneously to forget it all and move on. We’re being pulled in more directions than Michael’s hairpiece.

Rees-Mogg was quick to claim that perhaps the laws were too strict, and should never have been enacted- and between this and the claim by the Metropolitan Police that retrospective crimes wouldn’t be investigated, unless we happen to recruit for minority report style policing my future defence for any crime committed will be “it’s all in the past now, the law is too strict, move on- in fact, congratulate me on doing such a good job”. Let’s see how that works shall we?

Approximately 17,000 people have faced criminal sanction for breaking lockdown rules- and those claiming that they should be refunded miss the point that a refund acknowledges Johnson should also be let off- in my eyes, if you broke lockdown rules you- and he- are subject to punishment on behalf of those of us who did our damndest not to spread the virus.

Another person who bent the knee without a moment of question was Priti “torpedoes away” Patel- taking a brief moment away from writing authoritarian legislation whilst gently caressing her well worn copy of Mien Kampf, she put a message into the tory whatsapp group (imagine how dry that group must be… PORK MARKETS!) to let them know she stands with Johnson. Patel, known for having the moral fibre of a rusk- condemns misogyny but works for a man who talked about grabbing women’s arses, who is disgusted by racism but denies it’s systemic presence in the system she maintains, who thinks the death penalty is a good idea even if people are innocent of their crimes, who stands for protecting British citizens* (*unless you’re gay or of colour or disabled or naturalised as a citizen or a woman or old or poor…) and the age old Great British values of racism and inappropriate smirks.

But let’s not forget who is also culpable here- a reticent, sneaky and subverted media whose job is to inform the British public of newsworthy events and give us, uncritically, a picture of our world, our country and our politics, sat on reports of these parties even as their own colleagues attended! The media is as culpable as the tory party for attending these events and for burying them in the sand- and once we sweep out the self serving tory party we should be casting a critical eye over journalistic moxxie in the UK and asking why they felt it appropriate to obfuscate these vital stories.

Casting a broader eye away from the media and to the rest of the tory party, and widening the lens beyond partying we can see that this isn’t just a Boris Johnson and his criminal ineptitude problem- the tory party as a whole is institutionally corrupt, debased to a level akin to violence.

PPE VIP lanes now ruled illegal, the restoration of Patel after proven allegations tantamount to espionage only for her to bully staff out of a job, Theresa May’s hostile environment and Windrush reaction and that of her Grenfell response, Owen Paterson’s indignance at being found to be a scumbag and his insistence on blaming the public for being angry that he lobbied for a terrible company to give us terrible service, track and trace to the tune of 37 billion, delivered late and carried in the data-sieve hands of Dido “GDPR” Harding, a Brexit which has caused food, energy, petrol and more issues, Eat out to help out (“out” being COVID-19), Matt Hancock too busy having an awkward teenage looking fumble to be health secretary during a health crisis, Javid throwing off all restrictions as if being an open economy makes up for tens of thousands of preventable deaths, Dominic Raab trying desperately to google what time the sea opens as “Afghanistan Minister- Missed call” flashes up on his phone for the 7th time that day, Dominic Cummings tootling about the country with a car full of pathogen and who thought that driving a one ton machine powered by dinosaur explosions was a good way to make sure his eyes were in working order. These parties are the latest episode in a cascade of cacophony that is only outstripped by the thud thud thud DJing of the music in the basement of our most prized political institutions. Corruption is the surface level scummery of the tory party, and the only conserving that the Conservatives have done is to Conserve their own hides; the only person to lose their job so far in the allegations- provable ones- of illicit parties is a person who wasn’t even AT the parties but joked about them, as callous and cavalier as any attendee.

Johnson’s cabinet is being chewed up by the woodworm of corruption, but to try to assure the public that throwing him out will deal with this rot is to lie as surely as Johnson at the despatch box. If a cabinet is rotten you don’t replace the struts- you throw it out wholesale and get a new one with the hope this one does not succumb as did the last.

The British public only has one choice- not to “keep calm and carry on”. We have to evict this disgraceful and corrupt party from office.

Ultimately there is only one party that deeply concerns me overall- the tory party. And much like the ribald bashes thrown in Downing Street over the two aching years of pandemia endured, apparently solely, by the common man- the party is truly over.

Daviemoo is a 34 year old independent writer, radicalised into blogging about the political state of the world by Brexit and the election of serial failures like Trump and Johnson. Please check out the rest of the blog, check out Politically Enraged, the podcast available on all streaming platforms and share with your like minded friends! Also check him out on ko-fi where you can keep him caffeinated whilst he writes.

What is it that empowers the right? Political ineptitude, selfishness or a willingness to compromise on morals?

By Daviemoo

Forgive me for the rambling -As I write this on my lunch break at work I’ve posted a video I recorded this morning about some of the sacrifices I made during lockdown which have yet again been made fruitless by the incompetence of a government unable to follow their own rules. It’s past time that this blustering, self aggrandising mobster government be sent to the gulags of history and judged as a failure- not just because they are criminally inept at the job, but because they are criminal full stop.

A very American problem

The right have many a method to stay in power. In America, Donald Trump never won a popular vote- but won his first term as president due to an antiquated votership system, the Electoral college -and may have won again were it not for the valiant efforts of supremely invested politicians like Stacey Abrams who worked tirelessly against gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement. Abrams should go down in history as one of the truest patriots America has ever seen, and her heroism is unsung because America still fights in it’s hear for freedom from a dictatorial cancer – not “conservatives” or “republicanism” but the monster these two types of right wing populist politics have created- the GQP, a bent and blunted force for uneducated Americans to rally around, blaming the blacks and the fags and the jews for their woes- and not long standing contempt for working class Americans, not a broken health system which will bankrupt you for the sin of developing cancer, a deeply propagandist education system more interested in teaching the masculine values of waving a flag and a laughably flawed justice system which allows the gunning down of an innocent sleeping paramedic or protester with automatic weaponry.

Where is England’s Stacey Abrams?

The toxicity of tory

In the UK, the voting system in combination with the differences in voter demographic, mixed with a terminal indifference to politics for younger people have led to the continuation of the tory government. Right wing parties dropped out of the running in areas where tories could gain seats to prop up Johnson, and though over 50% of the UK voted for left wing parties we have in place a tory government with an almost unprecedented control of the house of commons. There is the first piece of evidence to my claim – instant switching of alliegance to tory just to win, even if you didn’t believe in their aims- you just wanted that 52 to 48 result respected. But do you know what else we have after twelve years of tory rule? Under the conservative government, poverty has risen, income inequality has skyrocketed- quite literally as Richard Branson achieved his wet dream of space flight as the rest of us wrote costing sheets to make sure we can afford rent and bills. Anti LGBT+ hate crime has escalated over 300% in 4 years.

The concerns of women about corruption in the police force, both from female officers and hapless women harassed in the street were met with ridiculous sneering contempt – flag down a bus, they were told by flippant Met Officers who backed and still back the tory government- why? Because they are given unique power to attack thsoe who stand against them. Meanwhile the met completely fails to investigate repeated, open, obvious breaches of the covid laws and restrictions which have seen over 5000 Londoners in court paying fines- and, I hasten to add, rightly so. To break lockdown is to thwart attempts to control and curtail a dangerous pathogen. So why are the tories uniquely protected against prosecution, as Cressida Dick wags a bony finger at journalists to dissuade further questions that may bring out more queries?

We have politicians who try to hold the government to account – Zarah Sultana is prodigious and fearless, Dawn Butler passionate and eloquent, Rosina Allin-Khan a front line worker who still finds time to visit parliament and beg the government to explain it’s lacklustre efforts. As an aside each one of these women of colour have been met with belligerent repudiation, told to “mind their tone”- a sentiment oft- weaponised against people of colour and especially women of colour who do not play to the demure-seeking demands of bigots.

The crux of this post is to make people realise that right wing people will do what others simply won’t because of decency. Be it solemnising a company then, before the company is even formed lobbying it to parliament to supply PPE (as a tory lord did), creating a VIP supply lane, using problematic language to slap down women of colour, or- as today’s news displays, showing pathological indifference to the suffering of people trying their best to curtail a pandemic’s deadly spread.

This pattern of thinking leads to a question I’m often asked- do you think all tories, all brexit voters, all right wingers are racist, homophobic, bigoted etc?
Not necessarily no- but they do what I won’t. They compromise on these issues. “Oh I don’t hate foreigners at all, i just *insert reasons for voting here*”. It seems to me that if I didn’t hate foreigners I wouldn’t vote for something that gave the strong and close to undeniably did in fact do that. And always with these voters they’re allowed plausible deniability. Brexit was for taking back control -of what? Our borders? We had more control in the EU. Of our legal decisions? The tories are trying to remove scrutiny from courts. Of our position as a world superpower? Our economy is decimated by brexit, international trade in and out is down, we have trade deals that WORSEN our GDP and we are a laughing stock, a tiny group of islands left to float in our own “anti-woke” seas, now swimming with happy british fish and, of course, tory approved human shit.

Voter ignorance or voter indifference?

Right wing politics, at their face, seems only to be about no compromise. We want this! We want the woke cancel culture agenda to end, we want the trans people’s rights gone, we want to continue to deny our imperialist role in slave trading, in white supremacy, in a devastatingly clear-cut class system. But that’s the lie- right wing politics is nothing BUT compromise from the voter’s level.

Voters who claim not to hate LGBT+ people somehow mysteriously fail to clarify that they are disgusted with the lack of action from Liz Truss who has been in the role for years and has just, again, rolled back the end of the consultation period for a complete block on conversion therapy in the UK- though 3 other countries have done so in the last 2 months. Voters who claim to be disgusted by racism will bend to apoplexy over the statue of a previously unknown slaver being torn down in disgust, and who borrow Johnson’s line of “context” to explain his comments about watermelon smiles or letterboxes.

Voters who say they don’t want foreigners coming here will stare on with blank eyed indifference about news headlines about atrocities the UK committed whilst holding tenderly on to the hand of the US.

Right wing votership is, in my eyes, about one of two things: the ability to wholeheartedly vote against your own self interest and protection because it will also make everyone else unhappy, OR the ability to vote for what you think is your own self interest whilst actually voting against it, under the guise that it strikes a blow against your imaginary enemy.

…but who IS your enemy?

Who is really making your daily life worse? The tired, hungry migrant in a boat out at sea who just wants to make it to shore without being tossed into the maw of the sea to lie with the bones of countless others? Or is it the politician gesticulating about the necessity of taking more money from your salary to prop up a health system they have criminally underfunded for their dozen years in power?

The ostensible links the right make are easily broken- but only if you are capable of listening to fact. Hate the hundred or so migrants who come here a day? Think of them as offsetting the death toll caused by conservative reluctance to place restrictions on the country to curtail coronavirus infection. You hate benefit fraud? Only a few dozen convictions- and who, may I ask, is in charge of the benefit system? It would be the very government you support who don’t and won’t change the system, because they know you can be angry at benefit cheats- instead of politicians who claim £50 back for a charitable donation. MP’s expenses combined would be more in a month than benefit claimants get in a year, even if they fudge the system. And yet the anger is spewed at our underprivileged fellows- because we don’t feel entitled to rail against the creators and maintainers of that flawed system.

Not all right wingers are this type. Some vote right knowing what they are voting for. Some want this sort of draconian rule by people who decry the censorship of language- you’re not even free to call people like me faggots these days- whilst supporting laws that effectively end the ability to demonstrate in public, which make voting more difficult and inaccessible to those who are already under-represented in parliament- tangible freedoms lost or pushed into the distance whilst people get angry about the non-existent thought police.

Still more are simply beneficiaries of the system. We’re taught to worship trickle down economics even as those at the top swim in oceans of wealth hoarded away from us and as our throats run parched, barely sustained from the drip drip drip of financial offcuts. Wealth disparity in the UK is at a terrifying new height- not just because of the pandemic which no one truly predicted, but because of brexit, because of a foolish lack of foresight by a government only concerned about enrichment of the already rich and by the complicity of an underclass who believes that the north star of the Union Jack is their guiding light to supremacy in the world. Just because the man who owns the company you work for is rich and the company is making world beating sales- doesn’t mean you’re prospering as you desperately try to save to pay your mortgage. And again – who maintains that system of tax cuts for your boss and tax hikes for you… but let me guess, Boris is a man of the people? You like his hair? Does he just “get” you?

It’s come to the point now where I wish right wing voters would just say the real truth, the truth we all know but never call out because “wokeness” and “censorship”, because “I’m allowed my opinion”. People vote right because they do not understand what they vote for.
You might be able to install a government that will roll back protections for those nasty trans people – but they are also a government who will force you into debt, crush your pension, close down your workplace and- whilst you wait at home, desperate to make sure your vulnerable mother doesn’t lie choking in a hospital bed as a plastic clad nurse tries to offer her muffled words of comfort- they throw back bottles of champagne which cost more than your daily salary.

Right wing voters compromise on their morals to install governments who work against their own people- and are too dense to see it.

Did I make you angry?

Good.

The point of this entire blog is to make people who think in opposition to me THINK about what they believe or vote for. If you truly believe for a single moment that Boris Johnson is the best representative for you, that he understands your daily struggles from a popped tyre to redundancy, you’re a fool. We are chess pieces on a very large board to the tory government. And the time to oust these flagrant shills is so far gone it can’t even be seen by the naked eye. If you truly wish to prove me wrong, and that you’re not willing to compromise your morals then show me by not voting for the people who “make me pay less tax which is good even if I don’t agree with them on drowning migrants”.


The United Kingdom deserves a government better than we have, a government who will work for the good of us all, a government run by those who have lived our experiences, have faced our issues, who are cognisant of our frustrations. Not a nodding dog of moral vacuousness who prattles on about building back better, about hands face space, about get boosted now- the only three word slogan the UK needs is “you’re our employees”.

Daviemoo is a 34 year old independent writer, radicalised into blogging about the political state of the world by Brexit and the election of serial failures like Trump and Johnson. Please check out the rest of the blog, check out Politically Enraged, the podcast available on all streaming platforms and share with your like minded friends! Also check him out on ko-fi where you can keep him caffeinated whilst he writes.

The Met Police are not fit for purpose

By Daviemoo

From the foolish bleating of “I’m very sorry” from top brass Cressida Dick, to disconnected and out of touch advice like “run away” or “flag down a bus”, the Met Police has shown itself to be an institution awash in corruption and unable to fulfil it’s purposes of truly protecting and serving the public.

When an institution is corrupt in the way the met police is, the obvious signs are an unwillingness to change even in the face of the evidence that this is required. Some would say that enforcing new laws which prohibit protest is a condemnation of any police force- that a police force which serves the public should- MUST allow protest to be undertaken as a show of the civil rights and liberties of the citizens of the country. The BLM protests in the UK were vitally and correctly aimed squarely at the doorstep of a government who perpetuates the kind of insidious, quiet but ever present racism that continues to propagate poor reception to people of colour, all the while denying that this takes place. But it also pointed the finger of blame directly at the police who are so often involved in horrific incidents of police violence against people of colour for doing nothing more than existing in black skin.

Any institution which was meant to serve the public would rightly have heard the cries of discontent from people of colour and from their supporters and turned their beady eye inward, looking for the causation of this discontent. Independent panels would have been appointed, focus groups set up to engage with communities whose trust in the institution of policing are fractured, new ideas on engagement and constructive policing put forward to allow policing to find its faults and fix them. Those who suffered so terribly under corrupt officers would have their voices elevated.

This did not happen.

In fact, a closing of ranks occurred around the BLM protests and formented the sort of impenetrability of change that is still being fought so hard against, specifically because of what came next; when a woman was murdered and another died in suspicious circumstances, Blessing Olusegun and Sarah Everard, women rightly were both furious and terrified. Little has seemingly been done to solve the mysterious death of Blessing Olusegun- her mother held a vigil recently in her memory and in the article regarding this vigil we read the statement from Sussex’s police force who deny that they failed to investigate the death properly due to ethnicity- put perhaps ethnicity is part of the problem, the next part being that Blessing was a woman.

Everard’s death at the hands of a police officer – and he WAS a police officer at the time no matter how many times the Met Police try to distance themselves from this- has rightly terrified women. At the time it was said that you can do everything right, wear the right clothes, be cautious (and even then those sentences struck me as odd- the blame being laid at the door of the person under threat), but to find out that her killer was a police officer who used his status to kidnap and murder her lent another sickening blow to the news. How are you meant to feel safe when those you’ve been told for so long will protect you are the killer themselves? How do you know what constitutes a “legitimate” arrest, a “legitimate” detainment? The police would of course say “know your rights”- but surely “don’t violate my rights” would be apropos.

Evidence is still emerging that Everard’s murderer was sending vile content to other officers via WhatsApp- misogynistic, homophobic, racist- five officers other than he who seem to find inequality a joking matter- good, then, to know that these are the people we are meant to turn to in the event of being discriminated against. One must question how many conversations Sarah’s name is in right now, and whether these oh so upstanding officers all over the country are treating her name with the gravity it so deserves.

Just look at the response to the vigil- thousands of women gathered, masked and social distanced, to pay their respects to someone they felt connected to, knowing it could have been them but for a random twist of fate. How did the police- one of whom had perpetrated this terrible crime- respond? With handcuffs and violence. Just like he did.

If this doesn’t tell you that policing is fundamentally corrupt, that police will strongarm women at a vigil but allow football hooligans to storm a stadium, that they will prowl the outside of a BLM protest but ignore anti lockdown rioters then you miss the message: that policing is only ever about punishing the noncompliance of those who question the system of policing, not about protecting those who do not break laws.

Look to the knowledge that the police view fundamental stances on human rights- equality for POC, for the LGBTQIA community as “political” standpoints (as proven in the case of Harry Miller who said that his transphobic tweets were just that). These things should NOT be political. Human dignity should be granted to everyone and yet is not- this should be the blazing issue for those whose job is to uphold law and liberty, rather than lobbying for an ever growing budget or working hard to obfuscate the dizzying number of police officers involved in committing their own crimes.

Look too, to the ridiculous advice from the Met: run away or flag down a bus if you’re worried by the officer arresting you… firstly, the white privilege it must have taken to think this an appropriate response when person of colour after person of colour has TOLD US that any noncompliance is met with violence. The met does not care to hear the public’s cacophony of complaints about it’s behaviour in favour of remaining exactly how it is- tight lipped, preferring to protect even those most corrupt of officers- it was even reported on Tuesday that some officers still spoke supportively of Everard’s murderer.

All of these issues fit into a society so determined not to upset the status quo that it is willing to overlook the failings of it. Women feel endangered and must go so far to protect themselves- but it’s not that many women it happens to? Oh but it IS that many women it happens to? Well have they tried to wear different clothes, carry protections, not listen to music, hold their keys in a certain way, make a route, check in with friends?

There will, there must, come a moment where society realises how fundamentally it is letting down women and it must- there is no other way forward- address the behaviour of men- not just policemen though statistics do show (by JUNE 2021 the police had recorded EIGHT HUNDRED CASES of police domestic violence) that the police attract a worrying sub demographic of those who engage in horrific domestic assaults. I cannot find the most up to date figures but almost a thousand reported cases of this crime- knowing how many incidents are not reported, this is a frightening figure- and that was only halfway through the year.

And the injustice continues unabated- anyway – Sabina Nessa, murdered in a London park for the terrible crime of- being a woman alone. The names of these countless women thrown under the runaway train of misogynistic violence must be etched deep in stone for men to see, to take stock and to account for their actions and, indeed, their inaction.

Until society addresses the way men behave and feel is appropriate these heinous crimes will continue and will propagate. Until men realise that it is not women who must change but men must account for their, and their fellows’ problematic practices, this horrific cycle of murdered women written off as isolated incidents, as incels committing terrorist offences in the name of their own repugnance will only go around again, and with a terrifying knot in our collective stomach we must ask – who will the next murdered woman be? Will we know her? And what will become of the man who decides his sexual desires or fantasies are more important than human life.