Britain’s Racist Far-Right Riots, Brexit and the Shameful Responsibility of Politicians and the Mainstream Media
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Over the last week, racist far-right rioting has erupted in towns and cities across the UK, cynically engineered by provocateurs who used a horrendous homicidal attack on a children’s dance class in Southport on July 29, at which three girls were stabbed to death, to falsely suggest that the attacker was a Muslim asylum seeker who had recently arrived in the UK after crossing the Channel in a small boat.
The reality was that the attacker was an evidently severely troubled 17-year old, born in the UK, whose Christian parents came to the UK from Rwanda, but the lies had a baleful life of their own, galvanising far-right groups and individuals from across the country, committed to Islamophobic violence, and connected via the swamp of unregulated or barely regulated social media and chat groups, to descend on Southport, just a day after the stabbings, where they targeted a mosque, fought with police officers, injuring 50, set fire to a police van, and damaged cars, homes and businesses.
The day after, July 31, the rioting spread to Hartlepool, where a mosque was attacked, Manchester and Aldershot, where hotels housing asylum seekers were attacked, and London, where rioters clashed with police in Whitehall.
Despite the Landslide, Labour Have No Vision and Only Won the UK General Election Because the Tories Lost So Spectacularly
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So the good news is easy. After 14 years of cruelty, incompetence and corruption, the Tories were wiped out in yesterday’s General Election in the UK, suffering their worst ever result, and ending up with less MPs than at any other point in their 190-year existence.
Of the 650 seats contested, the 365 seats that the Tories had when Rishi Sunak unexpectedly called a General Election on May 22 were slashed to just 121 (a loss of over two-thirds), with their vote almost halved, from 13,966,454 in 2019 to just 6,814,469 yesterday.
High-profile Tory losses included Liz Truss, the disastrous 43-day Prime Minister, whose vote plunged from 35,507 in 2019 to 11,217 in South West Norfolk, the absurd and offensive pro-Brexit toff Jacob Rees-Mogg, and a number of ministers until six weeks ago including the vacuous Tory pin-up Penny Mordaunt, the empty Grant Shapps and Mark Harper, the far-right ideologues Liam Fox and Johnny Mercer, and the offensive Thérèse Coffey and Gillian Keegan.
How Brexit Gave Us Vile, Broken Politicians Who Despise Human Rights and Seek to Criminalise Refugees: Part Two
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The second of two articles in which I examine how the Tory government’s vile anti-immigration policies, pursued with such vigour by Priti Patel and Suella Braverman, have their origins in the dangerous isolationism of Brexit, and its unleashing of false and disturbing notions that, post-Brexit, the UK should no longer be constrained by international law. In this first article, I looked at how Brexit happened, how Theresa May paved the way for the shoddy and cruel lawlessness of Patel and Braverman, and how the Tories, even before Brexit, consistently sought to undermine the European Convention on Human Rights, with a particular focus on Theresa May’s obsessive pursuit of the Jordanian cleric Abu Qatada. (See Part One here).
Ruthlessly self-seeking and, morally, a complete vacuum, Boris Johnson swept to power in December 2019 by following the populists’ playbook established by Donald Trump — a three- or four-word slogan, hammered home at every opportunity. For Trump it was ‘Make America Great Again’, while for Johnson it was ‘Get Brexit Done’, delivered despite the evident impossibility of getting it done without consigning us to relentless economic decline and international irrelevance.
While Johnson’s dithering over Covid, his persistent lying and his corruption (not least in fast-tracking billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to cronies during the Covid lockdowns for services that they were patently unable to provide) defined his Premiership, what must not be overlooked is the extent to which he also empowered the far right of the Conservative Party in their rabid enthusiasm for a post-Brexit bonfire of fundamental rights.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
