Tag: kill the bill

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.

A NEW THREAT TO HUMAN RIGHTS? Must be a Tuesday in Toryland

By Daviemoo

Protest is a fundamental right- Whether it’s to stand up against corn-drunk overlords in the feudal days, to gather a party and march on the palace in the days of absolute monarchy or to kneel in Millennium Square in Leeds in solidarity with the people of colour whose lives have been stunted by racism and racists, protest is in our blood, our bones, our DNA.
We use protest from the macro to the grandiose, every time we tell a boss they can’t treat the office poorly, every time we tell a stranger to stop behaving inappropriately- but it’s most contentious use is to speak out against those who wield power against us. Holding power and wielding power irresponsibly are not bedfellows, but in this dark and twisted timeline, somehow these two disparates have been conflated: a government who uses its power against you is not normal. A government should be in thrall to it’s people. The tories are not, Least of all Suella Braverman whose new bill poses the most open assault on British freedom in recent years. George Monbiot has done a masterful thread on Twitter, explaining the thorny new bill proposed by Suella Braverman.

PMQ’s today was, as always, an exercise in futility. From the opposition benches came questions of hole-filled economic policy, accusations of not being up to the job, frank concerns raised about people who will die in freezing rooms or alone with mental turmoil this winter- and from the tory benches, foolish rambling nonsense about rugby teams and “will the right honourable lady agree with me that…” which benefits nobody.
Tory, labour, SNP, Greens… it doesn’t matter the alignment of the person on those benches- to constituents facing the very real possibility of poverty these ridiculous questions do not matter. It is long since PMQs was of any real use to the people of this country. Now elected to stand before the dispatch box is the shambling corpse of a party once elected as fiscally competent until this prime minister hollowed out the British economy, or thought of as the party of law and order until the last prime minister broke fundamentally vital safety laws in office.

But one point not raised was the new legislation dragged from the dungeons by Suella Braverman.
Braverman’s public order bill is an authoritarian monstrosity, forcing those who have attended protests- even peaceful, planned protests- to submit to government tagging, monitoring and threatening custodial sentences for anyone who encourages others to protest online. Draconian is not the word- Suellenian is, because Suella Braverman is a step past draconian.
Under this bill any protest activity is essentially treated as extremism, including retrospectively. Protest in the last five years did you? Did you attend BLM protests? Pro EU marches? Strike action? Or on the converse side… anti lockdown marches… then you can be forced to wear an electronic tag like a shoplifting teen, forced to register your whereabouts and you are forbidden on penalty of prison from using the internet to speak about protesting. I abhorred the anti lockdown protesters, because I knew that they would spread the virus that took me to the floor, and make the entire ordeal of lockdowns and restrictions last longer- but they still had the right to do it as surely as I did over BLM or trans lives.
This bill takes a paring knife to the few dried strips of flesh left on the bone of English protest rights (it does, happily, not extend to devolved nations), meaning that English people would be fundamentally unable to speak out against this government- and why would this be? This is, after all, the government who has, since 2016, parroted the will of the people at every turn. If the will of the people was of concern to the conservatives, they would surely be happy about any way in which they can hear it? And of course, a government doing a successful job wouldn’t need to legislate against people speaking out against it. Imagine being so bad at governance that, instead of doing the things people want and need you to do, you just legally stop them from complaining.

But this isn’t the only gaping irony exposed by this new behemoth-bill.
it’s less than three weeks since Truss stood at the tory party conference, gesticulating into the glossy eyed audience as she exclaimed at her excitement over wanting to be “a small governance” government, who doesn’t care “what you do in your personal life”- one does not have to care if one legally restricts you from doing what you want. And foolishly, Truss supporters (however few) gulp down this nonsense as fact. This government cares deeply what you do in your personal life, if that in any way diverges from their bold vision of autonomous workers free of the thorny legislation that means you get time off, holidays, sick pay and protection from bosses who will force you to work without adequate protections, legislative or physical.
Truss promised bold restoration of tory party values- a simple task, as the tory party has no values left, all consigned to the pyre of anti EU gesticulation and empty flag waving. Today at PMQs she declared she is “a fighter, not a quitter” which ironically is the main problem people have with her- we want you to quit, just call an election first and consign your twelve years of mayhem to the dustbin heap on which it belongs. It won’t be long before anti protest legislation pales into irrelevance because so many people are sick of Truss, sick of Tories, that there aren’t enough police in the entire UK to prevent the uprising on the horizon. Like the star tattoos of the early 00s, I imagine in five years time we’ll all be comparing our DBS checks to show which version of ridiculous protest law we were slapped with, and anyone without a disclosure will be deemed quaint or disparaged as an enabler of these eternal shysters.

When thousands of people took to the streets of London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool to protest against the police crime courts and sentencing bill the government studiously ignored it: I myself was at one protest in Leeds, flanked by police officers. “Do you actually want this” I asked of one, who simply stared ahead, ignoring me. “Do you want people to not even be able to stand here and say how they feel”. Nothing.
Now that bill is passed into law- protesting is functionally illegal without assent from the local police force. Think about that, in conjunction with the recently released report on the institutional failures of the Met to tackle its long raised issues with homo and transphobia, misogyny, violence in the ranks, the officers who protect each other from domestic abuse claims… We need to gain consent from those to whom consent means nothing in both bedroom and street, to protest against them. Protesters are being imprisoned for tearing down likenesses of our racist ancestors who used humans as cargos, because Braverman, who uses phrases like “tofu eating wokerati”, is fighting an ideological war of one.

Braverman is a step down from the bottom-basement step of Priti Patel. Her utter obsession with forcing conformance on Brits is madness. She claims to stand for free speech but is compelling people not to respect gender identity, she decries political correctness whilst demanding people speak the way she wants. She is not the last bastion of free speech, she is a desperate attempt to utterly destroy it. If you don’t speak like Braverman wants she hopes to criminalise you, and if you act in a way she disagrees with she will craft legislation so harsh that countries like China and Russia seem moderate in comparison.
Braverman is the burning ember of what is left from the tories desperate hoovering up of the cigarette ends of UKIP and other extremist parties, a useful puppet too stupid to understand contrition or politeness: her main issue with the phrase “politically correct” is that she’s never been correct once in her life, fondled by Johnson into the job of attorney general despite her lack of qualifications and legal nous. Lawyers and human rights experts alike went from rolling their eyes at her endless open mouthed nonsensical rambles like her anaemic defence of Johnson on question time to being slack jawed themselves at her appointment to Home Secretary. She is spectacularly hypocritical, a woman who shakes her fist at everything EU whilst benefitting from the Erasmus program she supported the scrapping of and someone who desperately refrains back to the idea that her way of living is freedom whilst she legislatively obliterates any other ways to be.

This law is the latest attempt from the tories to curtail any anger at their behaviour and it’s another inch on the rope around their necks: legislate away, Suella- when the dam breaks and the tsunami of frustration boils over, no amount of yellowed legal paper containing your photocopied signature will protect you from the reality of our displeasure with tory malfeasance.
But fight we must, against this. Braverman is convinced, in the face of an overwhelming amount of evidence, that she is correct. The British public must speak up and speak out against her, until her meek bleating is lost in the concerted cacophony of British people telling her in no uncertain terms that we have had enough of her, and of her party.

Until this time though, when finally we Brits come together as we must and take to the streets, I ask the readers of this blog to reach out to your MPs. Teenagers gluing themselves to roads or walls in protest of climate issues is less of a threat to our way of life than ever more condescending bills being thrust before the eyes of the unelected lords- I urge you to tell your MPs that you will in no way foster this bill being taken through to royal assent. And if your MP is a Labour MP I urge you to gain confirmation that labour will commit to reversing this, and all other degenerate protest laws the tories have put in place since their mind bending decision to back the dead end of brexit.

The UK is waking up to the tories and we will take back our country from this vile government. The only legislation I want to see is legislation that protects the people, by ensuring that this criminal cabal will never see power again.

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 Stupidification of Brits

By Daviemoo

As the Conservatives push hard to renationalise imperial measures, something we’ve always had on our food packaging my entire life as an ostensible “brexit benefit” that doesn’t directly revolve around-but will likely contribute to – a poorer economy, one must wonder how it is not obvious that the party is trying to contribute to an overall shift away from the rest of the world: Little Britain will be unable to sell goods to a market that doesn’t understand the measures, or that has to do extra work to do so. But this isn’t the only way the tories are working to Break down Brits…

Imperial Measurements- an exercise in futility- Boris Johnson

Imperial units seem like some kitschy reach back into the not so distant past- some little move towards showing the world we don’t need them because we have our own way of weighing corn and meat… not one person who isn’t desperate to return to the smoky pubs and “it’s ‘ow we’ve always done it” rhetoric of the past is particularly interested in starting to use imperial measurements again, because it is of no benefit to anyone who doesn’t regularly start sentences with “back in my day…”

Imperial measurements will make it more difficult to:
-Sell to other countries
-Cook
-Purchase necessary products and ingredients

It was also never “banned” by the EU, but to fit their standardisation model it was vital that we all used the same measurements- products in the UK have always been allowed to display imperial, just not as prominently as the other units.

So why would we do it? Because as always it pleases that tiny base who will thoughtlessly back the tories specifically because of nonsensical moves like this. Looking at the outlook of those who approve of this, they don’t care about the realistic damage and annoyance this move will cause now- but you can guarantee that they will be the loudest to decry it as soon as they experience issues resulting from it.
As we fall into measuring things here, we will lose step with the rest of the world- the pointlessness of making our coexistence harder rankles, but also fits perfectly well with the desired outcome of those in charge of implementing brexit: what seemed like a silly little brag fits in with the theme of isolationism behind brexit. Measures, money… what next?

The curtailing of university entry- Nadhim Zahawi

Recently it was announced that if you do not score certain fundamental grades, student loans will not be on offer, effectively curtailing university for those who fail to achieve in the earlier exams. This is a disaster both in terms of the hangover from coronavirus which adversely affected hundreds of thousands of peoples’ education, but is also- and there is no sensitive way to write this- a stupid idea.
I’ve written extensively about the myriad different learning styles for human beings, whether that’s an ability to absorb through physical action, reading, listening, watching demos and more- denying someone access to higher education simply because they cannot conform to the archaic system of listen, repeat in a slightly different way on a written exam is a disastrous response to the educational future of the UK. People can excel at university when given access to the right learning resources, teachers and allowed to study a passion subject instead the usual proscriptions of subjects given at a young age- and even if someone goes on to work in a completely different field, the ability to obtain a degree, masters or PHD is a vital skill that should be exercised for those who can – and want to.

Zahawi’s zest for preventing students who don’t excel at exams from reaching new chances of education is a transparent attempt to gatekeep knowledge from those who need it most desperately- and he should be looked upon with shame for this transparently reductive action.

Additionally, the spectre of “left wing censorship” and deeply worrying authoritarian moves to combat this nebulous nonsense has always been touted over university: searching student forums shows right wing students asking whether they will fit in- rather than simply acknowledging that their views, as all views are, will be questioned, it’s an immediate self censorship and a lack of understanding that an exposure to a wide range of people around you is likely to change your narrow views to wider ones: university isn’t a factory for spitting out left wing Leninists, they are buildings filled with knowledge, and intersected by tens of thousands of people you may not have met and learnt from before: you are not being converted, you’re learning other people’s lifestyles and exposure to this is the antithesis of reductive rhetoric.

Other tory ministers state that children should be asked to sing unsettling nationalistic anthems in schools– we truly are allowing steps towards childhood indoctrination to nationalism.

Throttling the media- Nadine Dorries

Despite 96% of respondents saying they wanted channel 4’s funding model to remain the same and a wealth of evidence presented that C4 is doing well in it’s monetary goals, Dorries has stated that the government will take steps towards its’ privatisation. Dorries has repeatedly demonstrated that she doesn’t know or understand- nor despite time and prompts, care to learn, how channels in the UK are funded (she has also wrongly stated information about the BBC, ITV and channel 4’s several messups). Dorries has stated channel 4 hasn’t “helped its case” against privatisation when “one of its lead presenters is shouting fuck the tories at a concert”. That would be a sentence in and of itself enough to sink any other culture ministers as blatantly taking revenge on a channel for a presenter not slavishly worshipping the government but Dorries is too busy making raps on tiktok to feel the shame she would if she viewed herself as a huge majority of the UK view her.

But the media also does the tories job for them- all of the big newspapers lean right, from the Daily Mail and its endless campaign to blame “lefty do gooder lawyers” for everything, the Express and its attempts to copy headlines that sound similar to those written in North Korea about their own “dear leader”. Other papers are too busy trying to scratch at culture war to make sales by punching down on minorities or both sides-ing debates which are patently pointless or a nonissue. Those media that do speak truth to power are often small or sat on, or- as we saw recently with Cummings’ admissions about the Johnson administration “throwing bungs” to right wing media whilst ignoring left wing or smaller media outlets, underfunded into oblivion.

Social media has seen an uptick in the amount of people desperate to speak truth to power there- its how I have come to what little prominence I have because the only place you can speak about the disgusting state of the country with little intervention (though lots of hate mail, the odd death threat and a sprinkle of doxxing) is social media.

The only way through this mire is a multi pronged attack. Social media is hugely influential when it comes to allowing the voices of ordinary people to be uplifted above the proscripted dross of the mainstream media- a phrase I hate but will indulge in here, but large scale organisation and a flat refusal to allow the government to pass damaging legislation must also start to take place. Fighting back against tory policy must take place both in cyberspace and in the real world – lobbying the government is ineffective right now, but we cannot stop and must in fact increase our efforts to battle them in the real world including against the frightening anti protest legislation they have inducted.

They will not stop us. We are many- and there are more of us than we think. Though decades of tory policy have enforced a miasma of glibly disenfranchised brits, people can be reached with the right message -we must find this message and galvanise those who would not normally move to counter this fight. We must- for without the voices of the discontented rising in concert, the zombie moans of a nation whose freedom is dead will only grow to silence us all.

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.

Either the bill dies, or democracy does

By Daviemoo

KILL THE BILL – that is all

As I write this, I’m all of 2 minutes through my front door after attending the kill the bill protest.

I’m already under the covers- everything is cold, the flat is cold, I’m cold. The only warmth is the fire in my belly from the huge display of solidarity I just witnessed. People of all ages, classes, ethnicities, genders, sexualities stood on the main street in Leeds (and are doing so around the country in other cities) marching. Not just for ourselves, but for everyone.

One could argue that the roots of patriotism are nourished by the pitter patter rain drops of the individual turning to the storm of people coming together in making our voices heard, and in protesting against our country moving in a direction we do not like. Some would disagree. Those who do have likely never had to protest against a single thing, either happy to let others do it for them or that forefront demographic who will never need to protest against censure because the world is their platform.

The Police, Crime, Courts and Sentencing bill is another bill which carries fascist tropes, designed to instil dogged obedience in the nation by removing or curtailing one of our fundamental rights- not, of course, outright criminalising protest but forcing bureaucracy and redundancy into it- those roots we just spoke of, throttled of nourishment by strangulation. Imagine the irony of having to apply to the police to protest against… the police? Imagine being arrested and charged for being a nuisance. Imagine facing years in prison because you blocked a road, shouted too loudly… This legislation is hand stitched by the fascist fingers of Priti Patel to sow discord amongst those who desperately need to protest to be heard and those whose cosseted lives make protest only something to watch, glossy eyed, on the TV.

The biggest irony known at present is that those who have spent two years of pandemia decrying their right to free speech, free faces, free bodies, are nowhere to be seen as our actual rights to live in democracy are threatened.

Standing surrounded by those who also feel the threat of this bill I encountered well spoken older people, students, foreign nationals, trans women, gay men, people of colour – all angry that their ability to speak out critically against a literally criminally inept government seeks to rip away our right to be heard in their flawed system.

I was also surrounded by those who I too often disparage as privileged- the everyman. Many of those at today’s protest were furious at the prospect of more rights being curtailed under the- not so much iron, but) wooden hand of Boris Johnson’s conservatives.
He’s taken so much from us in his short tenure with his attack ready home secretary ready to whip out more dangerous legislation.

Ask yourself, regardless of your political alignment, why you would ever happily sign rights that you’re entitled to away.

…and it’s not the first time

It’s mere weeks since the nationality and borders bill slugged through parliament. This bill has disenfranchised a disturbingly enormous proportion of the British populace. Some would say it’s divine right to be born and be a citizen of a realm- but others put in work to become, to naturalise, and to assimilate- and those people who have done so have had an abject lesson presented to them: that the tories will remove that from you at their whim. Even today I read a tweet from a man who has served the UK in his position as a soldier for 22 years- who faces deportation in 28 days.

Now we stand in the face of another bill, draconian in nature but more frankly just wrong.

The tories will continue to take, take, take from us- because we let them.

Stand up and kill the bill together. Or the only thing that dies is democracy.

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.

Sleepwalking Into Authoritarianism- The English Nightmare continues

By Daviemoo

Let’s get some things out of the way first: I am a woke, lefty do-gooder. If that upsets you, it’s a problem you may want to consider discussing with an experienced GP. This blog is my own version of part human/egg hybrid Dominic Cummings’ effusive ramblings on the monster he installed in Westminster, and if you disagree that is your right- but whilst it is A right, it does not mean you ARE right.

I’ve always been somewhat politically aware, but was one of the crowd who gleefully sleepwalked through British politics at large, designating it “out of my control” or “someone else’s problem”. This issue seemed to renege with age, and as I became aware of the power of the proletariat I felt something greater than I- a collective will to better the country which I was born in.

As I’ve grown though, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend of the stupider, the louder, the more uncouth running roughshod over traditional politics- from the human custard era that was Donald Trump’s wittering presidency, having to watch a man masturbating his own ego for a nation of people who didn’t even vote him into power, to the closer to home installation of the perceived bumblingly innocent and somewhat daffy Boris Johnson, or even looking to countries like Brazil with angry little men like Bolsonaro in charge; politics has changed and seems to have become a game for those who are happy to stand on the neck of morals for the sake of being seen as “strong”.

I finally broke and created this blog to get some of the words I’ve had rattling around my head down in word format, though I’ve been creating internet videos making pastiche of British politics for around 7 months now- the only way to manage the ever increasing political rage I feel.

As ridiculous day after ridiculous day rolled by, my patience and understanding of British politics has been worn down to the type of nub I expect both Johnson and Trump to be concealing in their oft-stained slacks. I am done with being pleasant to people who disagree with me politically because my politics are aligned to “for the good of everyone” in a nation whose politics daily seem to slide more into “for the good of the rich” or “for only me”.

I savour the daily insults from red faced lunatics who call me woke and sheep and weak, because the more they rage that I’m NOT LIKE THEM the more I am convinced that I’m on the side of right. And though I always treat my own views with a healthy dose of scepticism, the high irony of people who can’t even work out the hierarchy does not include them telling me that I am the stupid one, the sheep, the weak one, is a hefty source of amusement in a world with scant other resources to entertain me.

Kill The Bill

Today, in my virgin post on here, let’s talk specifically about the latest tory travesty – the death of non manufactured, and therefore helpful, protesting.

The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts bill was passed in parliament yesterday by a margin of 100.

This bill lays a heavy blanket of suppression down on everyone- regardless of political affiliation, though clearly those who are not in support of this government will suffer most. Protests, even one man protests, cannot take place without assent from, and collaboration with, the police- who, in the age of the BLM protests are often the subject of said protests. Protests by their nature are meant to be disruptive- they are, at their core, a show of the power of the proles, a demonstration that whilst we accept governance we can and may voice our displeasure with a simple show of bodies and chanting. This has been a right since time immemorial- and the false conflation of protests and riots has become laughably common in today’s society. Those with no sense of nuance will happily conflate the two, and decry those who partake in either- those people are usually the privileged who are either lucky enough to be unaffected by social issues or who simply don’t care.

The police already had too much confidence in their role as mediator of protesting- look at the vigil for Sarah Everard, in which police cornered and injured women who were standing up for their right to be safe- against men, but also- POLICE, because Everard was murdered by one of their own- subsequently other police were suspended for making off colour jokes about murder on WhatsApp- of course, we had the usual mumblings of “it’s just a few bad apples!”, but as usual the revisionists who want to protect the establishment so conveniently miss the finisher of that saying- “a few bad apples spoils the bunch”.

Again the police showed themselves up at the counter protests for this dangerous bill in Bristol, were accused- and it was proven with video footage- of using their riot shields as weapons, slamming them down on the backs of hapless protesters whose crime was… sitting. A nurse who was at the protests said “I cannot express how quickly it went from peaceful chants to head injuries. Not just bumps of a shield. I’m talking in excess of 5cm lacerations to the top of the skull – all of the ones I saw were struck from above.”

The larger picture of legislation this prohibitive passing is that we now live in a country where we must meekly accept the whims of politicians who do not live our lives, who do not understand our woes and yet who feel entitled to lay down edicts as to how we should operate as a society. But this is indicative of a society who has spent years, even before Conservatives came to power, being governed by those who do not understand the lives of those who fill the country. It has long been a source of frustration for me that we have health secretaries who have never worn a stethoscope, education secretaries educated at the finest private institutions, whose yearly rates are more than some parents make in twelve months combined; those best placed to govern are those who experience the life of those they work for.

Focusing back on this bill though: even in countries like Russia- a literal dictatorship- do protests take place without assent from the police- when Russia’s hope for independence from Putin’s rule, Navalny, was arrested and sent to essentially a horribly unsafe prison his group protested in the street- until, of course, Putin counteracted; now anyone seen to be allied with Navalny is a terrorist and STILL they protest.

In Bolsonaro’s Brazil, the streets are currently awash with violence after Bolsonaro’s bumbling has allowed COVID-19 to ravage the country- a country ruled by a maniac is protesting. And in our supposedly free nation, with our magical sovereignty that hasn’t changed one jot post brexit, that right, that fundamental right- is gone.

The fact that we operate in a society that politicians are trying to control the masses is not a shock- this has been the case since fiefdoms were the order of the day. The shocking part is that no media outlet, no prominent celebrities, barely any political figures, and almost no actual voters, humans in the street – are as furious as I am about this.

The UK now has the most prohibitive laws against protests in Europe- purely because Johnson and his crony Patel- want to make sure that we are toothless in our fight against their corruption – and the British public at large seem willing to simply lay down and accept it.

It’s such a fine irony to grow up in a country where you’re constantly told about our proud legacy as those who stood up to fascism and died in the fields to protect other’s freedom.
Our freedom has just been decapitated before our very eyes, blood still warm on our cheeks, and the fools it affects are just happy to let it go on.

Those who so proudly claim the doings of their own blood in wars are the ones so keen to support the tories, because somehow the conservatives have convinced people that they are “the party of Britain”, but to those I’d like to pose a question: is it truly patriotic to nod, smile and accept your country with all its faults, or is it patriotic to work for change, to expel the negatives and to work for your country to be something bigger, better, to remove the obstacles in society so everyone can live freely? If you truly believe that sheep-like acceptance of the status quo is patriotism i guarantee you that the relatives you so proudly edify would be ashamed of you, and would tell you that this is how fascism starts: acceptance that the state can and will do what it may, and that you must agree, blank eyed and fervent.

My question, therefore, to the British populace at large, is simple:
How long will you continue to lie down under tory rule- not governance, but rule- and allow this feckless band of grifters to dictate to you how you should live? And what, if anything, will it take for you to realise that you’re marching to their beat, not yours?

Update- Contact your local MPs

I hereby include an email I sent to my local MP and his response: it’s vital to contact your local representation and make yourself heard.