Back in 344, May snippets
, I commented upon the proposal to demand voter registration. This week a piece from Angela Rayner in the Guardian prompts a review of that situation. The 'elections bill' is up for discussion and vote in the HoC next week. Sadly, I think the majority position of the Tories assures that this will pass, when I largely agree with Angela Rayner that it is a solution for a non-problem and therefore its pupose is something much darker. I want to see declarations from other parties to repeal it at the first opportunity. Whole article copied below, from here. [1]
I connect that general tone with another Guardian article [2] from yesterday; John Harris compares the attitudes of the devolved parliaments with that of England and points to a general feeling of incompetence at the English national government. What there is of it, that is. Time, say I yet again, for that to be devolved. I cannot help but also contrast the English attitude with those of Australia and New Zealand, both of whom have locked borders—even from each other. How this perception of incompetence fuels the independence of Scots and the likely result if a referendum was imminent, is only one example of the possible consequences. England, the narrative goes, is dominated by reckless Conservative politicians who habitually lead their country into mishap and disaster, while the UK’s smaller nations emphasise caution, responsibility and, to use a phrase once beloved of Tony Blair and his followers, “what works”. [3]
[4] https://www.thenational.scot/news/17936347.scottish-tories-laugh-pms-salmond-sturgeon-fish-jokes/
DJS 20210906
Noticed by the boss, that Sturgeon and Salmond are fish, certainly to the ear. Surprised not to have caught comic hunmour based on this. But I found I'm ten years too late and then found [4] which is simply cringeworthy. I was better off missing this.
Next week the government will try to reverse centuries of democratic progress in this country. The Conservatives’ elections bill – copied and pasted straight out of the Donald Trump playbook – is a blatant attempt to rig democracy in the favour of the Conservative party by suppressing votes, gagging organised opposition and neutering our independent electoral watchdog. The government argues that its plans to bring in voter ID would combat voter fraud, but the truth is that widespread voter fraud just doesn’t exist. For all UK elections in 2019 – including a relatively high turnout general election, in which 32m votes were cast – there was just one conviction for voter “personation”. Instead, US civil rights groups have warned that the government’s voter ID plans will “allow politicians to choose their voters” as the new measures would disenfranchise millions of voters. If the government cared about the health of our democracy then it would extend the franchise to 16 and 17-year-olds and concentrate its efforts on registering the millions of adults in this country who are not on the electoral roll and can’t vote, instead of spreading baseless scare stories.
The bill also seeks to disincentivise trade unions, charities, civil society groups and campaigners from fighting for the same demands as political parties by introducing complex rules around financing “joint campaigns”. This will have a chilling effect on organisations being able to raise awareness and take action on social injustices. As the Committee on Standards in Public Life said in 1998, “there is absolutely nothing wrong with individuals and organisations engaging in such activities [political campaigning]. On the contrary, a free society demands that they should be able to do so, indeed that they should be encouraged to do so”.
This is an affront to free speech, freedom of association and the rights of working people to organise politically to further their interests – cornerstones of our democracy. Around six million people are members of trade unions – any attack on the rights of trade unions to organise and campaign on pay, rights at work and the issues that affect their members’ lives is an attack on the working people who got our country through the pandemic. Taken alongside the government’s policing bill, which seeks to impose authoritarian limits on peaceful protest, what we are witnessing is a determined effort to silence any communities or workers who seek to hold the government to account. Even the government watchdog, the Electoral Commission, which upholds electoral law and safeguards the integrity and transparency of political parties’ finances, has come under attack. The elections bill seeks to completely undermine the commission’s role and end any semblance of independence – at the same time as the commission is halfway through its investigation into the financing of the redecoration of Boris Johnson’s Downing Street flat.
We already have an independent adviser on ministerial standards who is not independent – he can only investigate breaches of the ministerial code once the prime minister says so – and the prime minister can simply ignore his rulings. Now the independent watchdog will be dictated to by the very ministers it is supposed to be regulating, too. And as if that wasn’t enough, the bill will also carve a loophole into existing political donation laws to allow donors who have lived overseas for decades to bankroll campaigns. There is no possible motivation for changing this law other than to enable super-rich Tory donors to funnel cash into the Conservative party from the beach in an offshore tax haven. This bill is an attack on our democracy. Labour will oppose it, as will everyone who believes in the right of each citizen to have an equal say in who governs them. Before voting for this assault on our rights, Conservative MPs should consider how many people sacrificed so much in the name of our hard-won rights, and decide whose side they want to be on.
- Angela Rayner is the MP for Ashton-under-Lyne, deputy Labour leader, shadow chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and shadow secretary of state for the future of work
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Trying to update my satnav, my lack of faith in instiutiions has risen to the point at which, instead of viewing the great delay in any update occurring as an issue to do with poor qulaity cables, I prefer to believe that TomTom has deliberately added delay to all updates so as to raise and encourage the idea that replacement of the gadget with the new improved model is a worthy action. It took two hours to update the spose TomTom, and mine, which is much older, has so far taken more than six hours.
The solution involved three changes: turning off all the security on the machine I was using, my 'big' one; realising that the system preferences allows me to look directly at the state of the satnav connection (not a cable issue at all); swapping to using the laptop instead showed that there never had been an issue.
But, while the security was turned off, some pernicious attack occurred and so I lost a load of updates on the back-up; 60-70 webpages simply disappeared from the desktop machine. Most of them are already posted so I am able to download the files from the website so that I can upload them all over again at the next update. Of course, I'm now (even more) paranoid about backups, especially w.r.t. the website, which is now quite large.
Wrong: what happened was that I loaded the not-current version of the website, so what I have been doing, is in effect, the update of the back-up file I have promised myself would occur.
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