The times we live in

I am so impressed by this summation of the U.K. that I thought it worth copying it for those interested to read
It was posted on our sister forum by a well known and well thought of poster.

“Report RedToothBrush Thu 26-Sep-19 07:25:16
The anger and language are getting more shocking, but expect more of the same and increasing as our politicians refuse to take the lead and our democratic institutions are torn apart by legal action.

The legal action was right to defend the rule of law. Its the last line of defence of the people. The courts including the ECHR defend our rights.

This also needs to be seen in context and outside of Brexit.

It needs to be seen in context with how May abused the law and disenfranchised many from their right whilst she was at the home office (and after she left by continuing cases after she left) in a manner which is hard to see as anything less than merely put of pure spite.

May deliberately tried to get around the rule of law, knowing that many of her victims would never be able to seek justice or if they did it would be retrospectively after she had already abused the power of the state, achieved her goal of removing foreign nationals and denied them their rights.

Leave.EU and many on the hard right of the Tory party have long had their eyes on human rights as the power of the courts is one thing that stops the state abusing power. They have already sought to undermine the justice system via cuts to legal aid etc. Many no longer have equal access to justice as a result. It leaves the vulnerable to abuses of power from above.

May continued this as PM by trying to trigger A50 without scrutiny.

But it goes beyond this too.

It's in all those government contracts with businesses which we can not Freedom of Information request and therefore scrutinise. This is widespread at local council level. Where is all our money going, and to whom?

Where is the local government accountability?

It's in the abolition of the audit office.

It's a drip drip of the removal of checks and balances.

Johnson is merely the result of the erosion of all these things and no one standing up and questioning what is more or less corruption - even if it happens to be legal.

It's like what Trump is doing in plain sight. Milking the systems for his own financial benefit. We know and understand the issue of breaking the US constitution with emoluments

The desire for politicians to look for loopholes to get around the system is regarded as legitimate. So legitimate that its resulted in the opposition having to resort to it, in order to try and halt no deal.

Their actions in doing this are a symptom of the problems we have from the erosion of democracy rather than a cause of it.

These things did not start under the coalition government either. You can clearly trace them back to Blair. PFI was all about essentially circumnavigating around the system of transparency and checks and balances to make the books look like we weren't borrowing as much as a nation. Frankly it'd cost us less to just let the state borrow the money.

All these things are connected and we didn't fully understand what we were doing or the price it was costing us.

It will take those who were involved and made those errors to acknowledge them to start to reverse things. There are many whose faith in politicians is zero because they know and understand these things along the road. Farage did too and he's kept his power dry understanding this anger and how he could harness it.

Johnson was an opportunists but Farage has long seen this coming and how he can exploit it.

Remember this does not end with Johnson.”