Busy times for me at the moment, but this is an aide memoir / place-holder for some later posts.
Its now undeniable that the current British Government is damaging our democracy. Several measures either proposed or enacted that strengthen the power of the executive, reduce accountability and/or threaten free speech.
- The intent to scrap the Human Rights Act
- The measures in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 which allow the suppression of protests which cause a ‘nuisance’
- Eroding the independence of the Electoral Commission
- Insisting on the regressive ‘First Past The Post’ method for elections that previously used something more proportional.
- The Online Safety Bill, which would impose impossible moderation standards onto social media companies and hand too much power to the Government to suppress speech it doesn’t like
- Measures to constrain Judicial Review
- New plans to curb the rights of workers to strike
- The undermining of ministerial standards and accountability, as demonstrated by the way the Prime Minister ignored the findings of a report that the Home Secretary bullied civil servants
- The Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act 2021 allows the security services to authorise criminal conduct in new, unaccountable ways.
These are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. There are probably more.
Continue reading “Reversing the Ratchet”