“The move – which uses secondary legislation to bring the powers into force – violates the constitutional principle of the separation of powers because the measures have already been rejected by Parliament.”
It seems that the UK government is determined to use just about every trick up its sleeve to outlaw peaceful protest. In February, it lost a vote in the House of Lords on the Public Order Act to broaden the interpretation of “serious disruption” (of other people’s day-to-day activities) in the already draconian Public Order Bill, to mean “anything more than minor”. Undeterred, the Home Secretary (the British equivalent of attorney general) Suella Braverman then tried to reinsert the change via secondary legislation, which has less parliamentary oversight and cannot be amended.
“A Make-or-Break Moment for Parliamentary Democracy”
It was, according to The London Economic, the first time ever that a British government has tried to use secondary legislation to directly overturn the will of Parliament. To try to stymie the move, Green Party Baroness Jenny Jones tabled a “fatal motion” to kill off the passage of the proposed legislation, triggering a vote in the House of Lords on June 13.
“This is a make-or-break moment for parliamentary democracy”, Baroness Jones said. “The Lords defeated the government on this issue and the Minister is now acting like a seventeenth-century monarch by using a decree to reverse that vote. What is the point of Parliament if a Minister can just ignore the outcome of debates and votes by imposing draconian laws on the public?”
A good question. Unfortunately, the fatal motion that Baroness presented in the Lords did not pass. Only 68 members of the house, mainly from the Liberal Democrat Party, voted in favour while 154 voted against. The Labour Party, which has been prevaricating on this issue for months, officially abstained.
“The result,” tweeted Prem Sikka, one of just 10 Labour Peers who rebelled against his party’s whip to vote for the motion, is that the “government has removed our right to protest.” Shortly after the vote, the human rights campaign group Liberty launched legal action against Braverman for unlawfully bringing in by the back door anti-protest legislation despite not having been given the powers to do so by Parliament:
The move – which uses secondary legislation to bring the powers into force – violates the constitutional principle of the separation of powers because the measures have already been rejected by Parliament.
By bringing in these powers, the Government has been accused of breaking the law to give the police ‘almost unlimited’ powers to shut down protests due to the vagueness of the new language.
The Government’s plans to lower the threshold of what constitutes ‘serious disruption’ at a protest were previously voted out of the Public Order Act by Parliament earlier this year (30 January).
Liberty says the Home Secretary has now changed the law entirely in a way that is an overreach of her power – defining ‘serious disruption’ as anything that causes ‘more than minor’ disruption.
The Public Order Bill comes just a year after the government passed the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, which imposed onerous new restrictions on protests and public assemblies. Under previous legislation, UK police forces had to show that a protest may cause “serious public disorder, serious damage to property or serious disruption to the life of the community” before imposing any restrictions. Under the new act, they can place restrictions on any protests that might constitute an existing offence of public nuisance, including imposing starting and finishing times and noise limits.
Now, the Rishi Sunak government is trying to redefine the meaning of “serious disruption” in order to give police forces even freer rein to stamp out protests. The ultimate goal, it seems, is to give police in England and Wales new discretionary powers to nip any protests in the bud before any disruption even begins. By broadening the definition of “serious disruption” to mean “anything more than minor,” the bill will mean (in the government’s own words) that “the police will not need to wait for disruption to take place and can shut protests down before chaos erupts”.
Shami Chakrabarti, the Labour peer and former director of Liberty, described the government’s attempt to get even more powers as “very troubling”:
“The definition of what counts as serious disruption is key to this bill because it is used as a justification for a whole range of new offences, stop and search powers and banning orders. If you set the bar too low, you are really giving the police a blank cheque to shut down dissent before it has even happened.”
In recent testimony to a parliamentary committee, Adam Wagner*, a London barrister who is a member of the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s panel of counsel and author of the book Emergency State, warned that the Public Order Bill will criminalise peaceful protest “in a way that hasn’t been done before” and will result in “a lot more peaceful protesters in prison”:
It treats peaceful protest like knife crime, drug dealing or terrorism. And I don’t mean that metaphorically; I mean it directly. These are serious crime disruption orders, terrorism disruption orders, stopping people from doing that thing in the future. These are the kinds of measures we have used to disrupt terrorism, knife crime, drug dealing and gang violence. I’ve been involved in lots of cases involving those kinds of orders.
I think what the bill will end up doing — if it’s used by the police, and the police will be under pressure to use it in particular instances — the end result will be lots more protesters in criminal courts, in very long, complicated trials that will involve looking at the proportionality of the protest in question… The other thing we will see is a lot more protesters in prison and a lot more peaceful protesters in prison.
Surging Tax Burden in Times of Stagflation
The UK, like many of its European peers, has witnessed a rise in political protests and strikes since last Autumn, largely in response to the stagflationary forces unleashed during the virus crisis and exacerbated by European governments’ self-harming sanctions against Russia. While the UK is forecast to narrowly sidestep recession this year, inflation remains stubbornly high at 8.7%. It is not just the prices of basic goods and services that have surged; so too has the tax burden — the result of the Boris Johnson government’s decision in 2021, when Sunak was chancellor of exchequer, to freeze tax allowances and thresholds in cash terms.
The resulting fiscal drag will raise significant sums for His Majesty’s Revenues and Customs as the average effective tax rate (total tax paid as a share of total income) rises more quickly over time, notes the Office for Budget Responsibility:
This happens as nominal earnings rise relative to tax thresholds, so that more of taxpayers’ income is taxed, and more of what is taxed falls into higher tax bands… Our latest estimate is that these measures will increase receipts by a combined £29.3 billion a year (1.0 per cent of GDP) in 2027-28… Based on HMRC ready reckoners, this would be equivalent to a 4p increase in the basic rate of income tax.
This is happening at the same time that costs of many basic products and services — particularly food — are surging. As a result, more and more working families, many of them debt-strapped, will fall into poverty. According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 14.4 million people were living in poverty in the UK in 2021-2, including 4.2 million children, 8.1 million working-age adults and 2.1 million pensioners. More than half of the people in poverty lived in a family where at least one adult is in work (54%). Unsurprisingly, poverty among private renters has also increased – up from 32% in 2020/21 to 35% in 2021/22.
By early autumn last year, the frustration was boiling over. In October, protests over rising energy bills exploded across the country, drawing large turnouts. In 2022 as a whole the country suffered the highest number of strikes since Margaret Thatcher was prime minister. Among the legions of workers protesting for higher pay to offset the cost-of-living crisis were rail workers, nurses, ambulance drivers, postal delivery staff, bus drivers and civil servants. The government’s response was to propose legislation allowing employers in key industries to sue unions and sack employees if minimum levels are not met. From WSWS:
[The proposed bill] forces a proportion of UK employees to work during a strike, denying them the basic right to withdraw their labour and sabotaging effective industrial action.
Currently targeting the rail, firefighting, health and education sectors and impacting one in five workers, the law could be extended to cover ever wider swathes of the workforce.
A Broad Global Shift Towards Authoritarianism
What is happening in the UK is part of a broad global trend. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic upended an already fragile global economy, inequality and social divisions were already rising fast around the world. The Global Financial Crisis of 2008 and the unwillingness of governments to tackle the underlying causes of the crisis — including huge levels of private debt (much of which was shifted onto public ledgers), unfettered speculation in the financial markets and the creation of ever more destructive financial instruments — have fuelled political instability and polarisation. According to the Global Peace Index, demonstrations, strikes, and riots surged by 244% between 2011 and 2019 (see Lambert’s in-depth round-up of this trend, from Oct 2019, here).
The economic havoc and supply chain crises unleashed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the West’s subsequent backfiring sanctions on Russia have made matters even worse. As I reported just under a year ago, bank and insurance CEOs are fretting about the threat of civil unrest as soaring inflation takes its toll on average living standards. According to Srdjan Todorovic, the Head of Crisis Management at Allianz Global Corporate and Specialty’s London unit, civil unrest is now a bigger threat to global businesses than terrorism. Nafeez Ahmed, the special investigations reporter of Byline Times, published an article warning that global banks are privately preparing for “dangerous levels” of imminent civil unrest in Western homelands.
For their part, many governments of ostensibly democratic countries, such as the UK, are responding to this threat by adopting increasingly authoritarian methods while accelerating the roll out of digital identity systems and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) that offer the potential of much more granular surveillance and control of individual citizens’ behaviour and actions.
The number of countries that are moving toward authoritarianism is more than double the number moving toward democracy, according to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, a Sweden-based global non-profit. Last year was the sixth in a row that the trend moved in that direction, the longest uninterrupted run of pro-authoritarian developments since the IIDEA started tracking these developments. These declines affected 46 per cent of the high-performing democracies, including the US, which “still faces problems of political polarisation, institutional dysfunction, and threats to civil liberties,” and 17 countries in Europe.
* It could be argued, as some on the UK left do, that Adam Wagner played a part in facilitating the Boris Johnson government’s crushing victory in the 2019 general election by representing the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) in its case against the Labour Party, which inflicted so much damage on then-Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s electoral prospects.
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There is literally no party to vote for, for anyone with even slightly left, let alone socialist, leanings in England. The Green Party are going the way of the German Greens in being all in for Nato and Ukraine.
Nobody to vote for and no possibility of protesting about this.
Orwell’s premonition of the future ‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever’ is looming ever closer.
Incidentally, for anyone worried that Boris Johnson could fall on hard times, he has been signed up by the Daily Mail as a star columnist.
Thank you, John.
Oh, that’s a relief, especially after Andrew Neil* refused to have him back at the Spectator*. As a lifelong socialist, I like to see people not have to worry.
His new country home, https://www.houseandgarden.co.uk/article/boris-johnson-house-mansion-oxfordshire, about 45 minutes down the road from where I’m typing, makes for a delightful retreat. The Thames, Chiltern hills and vineyards are nearby, so even more idyllic.
Johnson owns another country estate nearby. It’s currently let. If the estate is sold, the proceeds of sale go to his ex wife Marina as per a charge registered with the land registry and pursuant to their divorce settlement.
*Neil will host the Spectator’s summer reception shortly. It’s amazing and wonderfully clarifying to see so many Labour and Liberal politicians there. Again, as a socialist, I like to see people enjoy themselves and, just because they are socialist, not miss out on fraternising with oligarchs, blue Tories etc.
An inversion of intent from francis bacon’s quip:
The streeting/starmer (who is the top?) team are quite chilling in their shameless combination of the spineless, the careless and the malevolent.
Proper tories all*
Yeah them green parties strikes me as a return of the Victorian era liberal parties that would be all about token social programs for the urban poor but that in the end didn’t massively change the social structure.
As in the greens keep harping on about environmentalism, but they will stop short of anything that will negatively affect their urban consumerist lifestyle.
When the authorities make peaceful protest illegal, they also make having their heads removed from their shoulders eventually inevitable.
Thank you, Nick.
In the past week, I have attended summer receptions in the City. The expectation is that current conditions won’t ease before 2025 and even then that’s a relative term.
It’s not just insurers, I know Metropolitan and City of London police officers who warn similarly, but the latter have been since 2008 and been ignored, especially when their numbers were cut by the Tory-Liberal coalition and Theresa May made clear that anyone wanting to head a local force had to sing they could do more things with fewer staff.
Labour is busy rowing back on anything vaguely left of centre and as it’s likely to be the largest party in the Commons, if not in a majority, it will need these laws as things get worse.
The EHRC might as well be headquartered at the far end of the Mediterranean. It’s (now) there to crush socialists. Only the PMC and notional left fall for the likes Wagner, Carol Vorderman, Marina Purkiss, Supertanskiii, Carole Cadwalladr, Jolyon Maugham, Owen Jones, George Monbiot and Tim Walker.
Thank you Colonel.
The article quotes a crisis management expert who thinks that ‘civil unrest is now a bigger threat to global businesses than terrorism’.
Maybe — but I doubt that this plays much part in Braverman’s thinking, or that of her spads. They are just ripping off DeSantis’s ‘Combating Public Disorder Act’. HM Government is now a cargo cult pure & simple. Or, to put it another way, if Florida is the new Hungary, then England is the new Florida. I expect that transgenderism & sports will now move quickly to the top of the legislative agenda.
Interesting the focus on means not ends. The fear seems to stem from a sense of insecurity over a lack of legitimacy on the part of elites, such that mass demonstrations could come along and sweep them out of power, and possibly instantiate a new constitutional era. Yet to address this issue, they choose to resort to legal means of restriction, legal restrictions intended to suppress the possibility of the emergence of a real competitor in the democratic space, that is to say, legal restrictions against substantive democratic choice taking place. Yet the further Western political systems stray in the direction of “managed democracy,” the less political legitimacy these systems possess, especially in the West. There are parts of the world where people don’t care about democracy as long as you manage the economy competently, and aren’t too corrupt, but despite the monarchy, the UK doesn’t seem to be that kind of place (not that the Tories had some grand economic strategy or were beyond corruption).
It seems like a kind of death spiral, the more “liberal democracy” perceives itself under threat (as a result of it being perceived as counterfeit), the more it resorts to illiberalism and anti-democratic legal restrictions. Further, historically, the only way rule by a minoritarian faction can function is by unleashing cycles of terror. Its not clear that the liberal democrats have the ruthlessness necessary to seize the teleos necessitated by the solution they are seeking to the crisis. But even if they did, it is clear that you can only run terror for a set historical period before people get completely sick of it and don’t care, and then you are only left with a stasis and its only a matter of time before it shatters.
Inclusiveness has become a buzz word, but it would seem that the problem is a lack of a sense in the masses that the government is actually working for them, and energetic substantive efforts to assure the public that this is not true will do more to address the problem than ratcheting up political repression. It seems that they fear that things will collapse without some contrived bogeyman they need to wipe out through domestic repression, a pure exercise in being-as-negation. Being-as-negation does seem to be what unifies the Tories and the “Labour” program these days.
> It seems like a kind of death spiral, the more “liberal democracy” perceives itself under threat (as a result of it being perceived as counterfeit), the more it resorts to illiberalism and anti-democratic legal restrictions.
Exactly. You can look at history and think that we’ve been through crises as bad before and it led to a change in direction, in some cases a turn back to democracy, in others quite the opposite. But there are differences between then and now that worry me.
Leadership in “liberal democracies” has groomed and bought by US and transnational capital. Macron is the perfect example. He doesn’t represent and isn’t interested in French people. And that’s pretty much normal now. Michael Hudson explained how this is accomplished in a discussion in HK that was published here a few days ago.
Population and environment mean we have no time for years of revolution and war. The pressures of migration aren’t going to diminish.
Digital technologies (currency and ID as Nick mentioned) or just debanking, deplatforming, no-fly lists for dissidents and protestors. The Twitter Files shows the weaponry for this is in place and being tested by a happy public-private partnership.
The unanimity of the media is stunning. Radical conformity among medics, scientists, and technical specialists is also worrying. But maybe these isn’t new this time around.
Since no one can truly protest anymore, and strikes are becoming effectively illegal to a growing proportion of the population, can anyone tell me if this is not the functional equivalent to slavery?
Yes, one is not sold to the highest bidder, nor is there any sexual abuse, but if you have to work while being treated like a whipped dog, never having enough for food, clothes, or shelter? And let’s not forget the overseers, which are the courts and the police.
In the South, the slave owners, and after slavery’s official end, the plantation owners spend a lot of effort keeping the black slaves, later the sharecroppers from even talking with the poor rock farming or sharecropping whites, never mind socializing or working together. For the entire history of America there has been preciously little difference between blacks and poor whites. Yes, being a slave was awful, but in the day to day life especially both being under the control of the local elites, there wasn’t much of a difference, but almost always the elites kept the slaves or sharecroppers from allying with the white trash.
Honestly, between the slave patrols of the 1700s and 1800s, which were used against anyone not of the proper class, or the modern police with their legalized violent repression against protests or strikes, and with the use of enforced social position and violently, even lethally, enforce etiquette, it is starting to merge together.
Will it revert to the labor wars of the early 20th and late 19th century? It took over seventy years, but outside the South where it was exterminated using gun, noose, and fire, labor temporally won.
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it definitely rhymes.
While it might be anachronistic, it would be accurate to define it as a class war.
Maybe it might be failure of the ‘politics of envy’ to achieve escape velocity thanks to the implacably engirnereed ‘politics of right’.
I think the liberal democrats are happily ruthless so long as they don’t have to look directly at what they’re doing.
But it seems like some kind of sustained direct confrontation is what’s needed.
Well said, liberal and conservative policies have converged to such an extent that the only difference between the two factions is that the liberal are culturally-programmed to a set of mores that require them to profess to feeling bad about the results of their policies while the conservative faction are programmed to revel in the results as deserved punishment for the unworthy. Either way, both factions can support the status quo while still feeling themselves to be good people.
I find this section and the comments which follow very difficult to understand. The people in power in the UK now are conservatives, nationalist, illiberal, hostile both to democracy and civil liberties. To write about liberal democrats as being responsible for what is happening makes no sense. The Liberal Democrats were part of a coalition government which cost them dear politically but if they still had any of the power which they had in 2010 you can be sure that the UK would not be on the trajectory it is now following.
I am thinking that it what a party labeled itself as and its past actions do not have to match with future actions.
Just look at the American parties: Democratic Party, which used to be moderately left of center with a modest left wing, and the Republican Party which was right of center with a right wing that was more extreme than the Democratic left wing. Today, the Democratic Party is conservative, not liberal and has effectively absorbed the old moderate Republican center, and the Republican Party is insane, not really conservative.
People keep saying and acting as if we have the old parties of forty years ago, but from when the internal coups in both parties like the DLC (Democratic Leadership Council) under the Clintons expelled the old guard of both parties thirty years ago, this has been wrong.
Whatever some of the current British parties are supposed to be, they really aren’t. It is a façade.
Anonymous 2
‘The people in power in the UK now are conservatives, nationalist, illiberal, hostile both to democracy and civil liberties’
Agreed. But there are some continuities from the 2010 coalition government. As you know, Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem leader who became deputy PM in 2010, led the so-called ‘Orange Book’ faction of the Lib Dems. They were technocratic neolibs. The Orange Book itself, a kind of manifesto published in 2004, famously described the NHS as a ‘second-rate, centralised, state monopoly’.
A key backer of the Clegg/Orange Book faction was the hedge fund manager Paul Marshall — he actually edited the Orange Book. But Marshall went on to become a Brexiteer, helping to fund the Vote Leave campaign, and setting up the influential lobby group / policy shop Prosperity UK (if anyone remembers them). He now funds UnHerd — where the more well-heeled English Trumpists (sorry, NatCons) hang out — as well as GB News, which is a straight-up racist, conspiracy-mongering propaganda outfit a la Fox or Newsmax.
So the journey from liberalism to ‘post-liberalism’ is not really such a long one — especially for the mushroom billionaires of the hedge fund world.
I agree that the puppet-masters who pull the politicians’ strings may move from one project to another. Murdoch after all supported Blair because it suited him at the time (probably to be able to push the Tories in opposition into far more extreme positions). Whether people like Murdoch and Marshall can be described as having any political principles other than the pursuit of their own self-interest is, I think, very debatable. The problem of course is that billionaires’ pursuit of their self-interest clearly moves countries like the UK and the US steadily in the direction of fascism (let’s not mince words). In doing this they may make use of unprincipled or foolish politicians. However, once people start saying or implying that liberalism leads to fascism I have great difficulty in accepting the argument. What has happened in the UK these last eight years has been the result of efforts by all sorts of parties, all of them IMO illiberal, to bring about fundamental shifts to the right which they doubtless hope to see made permanent if they can manage it.
That the Liberal Democrats mishandled their role in the Coalition Government in 2010 to 2015 is, I think, undeniable. To what extent this was a result of cynicism on the part of their leadership, or naivety, I am not close enough to the relevant people to know.
The steady movement of the UK to the right over the last forty years has been complex and often involved people conspiring behind the scenes. I am sure I do not know half of what went on so would not attempt an unravelling of the full story. But it is clearly the forces of the right and far right who have been in the driving seat, not the liberals.
Anonymous 2
‘The problem of course is that billionaires’ pursuit of their self-interest clearly moves countries like the UK and the US steadily in the direction of fascism’
Agreed. National conservatism is the project of another billionaire crank, Peter Thiel. So it’s not clear which nation is at stake here. Silicon Valley? Mars? One of Thiel’s artificial islands, created by ‘seasteading’? But the question is besides the point, since this ‘movement’ is not really nationalist at all. It is white supremacy in a blazer and bow tie — or, as Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg put it recently, a ‘political ideology by its nature in contradistinction to liberalism or socialism’. The original Third Way…
As is generally the case, what is tried out in the UK eventually ends up being done in America. Just think of the Ring of Steel surveillance system in London. One could argue that the London roll out of that true Panopticon back around 2010 was the Beta test for the Surveillance State in the West.
See: https://www.nyc.gov/html/ia/gprb/downloads/pdf/London_RingofSteel.pdf
In a case of reverse pollination, London Police are just now instituting the general use of body cameras by their uniformed minions, a decade after the US began that trend.
See: https://lfpress.com/news/local-news/officer-body-cams-an-absolute-asset-st-thomas-police
We are no longer carefully venturing out onto the Slippery Slope. Now we are fully committed to the ‘Toboggan Ride to H—.’
The UK has no constitution. Parliament inherits powers from the Crown, and the Crown is an absolute monarch.
A document with Constitution as title doesn’t exist but there is a body of UK law that is functionally constitutional. Per the UK Parliament web site:
This is one of the reasons why I tell my peers that the UK is a wasteland.
The UK is ( unfortunately ) far from exceptional in that respect .
Oscar had it that … ”We are each our own devil , and we make this world our hell ”
It would be laughable were it not so pathetic …
Setting up nicely for that “V For Vendetta” real-life redux
One can flip it and resort to self induced lockdowns… We know they really don’t like those ones…
In addition to the right-wing authoritarian crackdown on freedom of assembly and free speech, the elephant in the room: Thanks to the MassMediaMonopoly most have forgotten about Julian Assange languishing in maximum security HMP Belmarsh. His treatment is tantamount to torture, as noted by UN rapporteur Nils Melzer. This is how the US/UK treats folks who expose imperial crimes.
HRC wanted to assassinate him with a drone attack. The Trump regime wanted to assassinate him Mafia style (“Fat Mike” Pompeo, CIA Mafia Boss, wanted to have him whacked). The Biden regime policy is largely the same.
As demonstrated by the persecution of Assange, The UK political and legal system makes a mockery of the rule of law and any freedom of the press, free speech, freedom of assembly etc. The UK (and US) claiming to support free speech and freedom of the press is the height of hypocrisy.
Recall the murder of US citizen and famous journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by Israeli soldiers in broad daylight. The US did nothing, not even a slap on the wrist for Israel. Great job of promoting press freedom eh
Recall the murder of US citizen and famous journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by Israeli soldiers in broad daylight. The US did nothing, not even a slap on the wrist for Israel.
“The US” doesn’t control Israel, anymore than it controls Goldman Sachs. Chris Hedges’ statement that “In the United States, there is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs” applies just as much to Israel, if not more so.
israeli leaders have said as much, with Benjamin Netanyahu saying that “America is a thing that is easily moved.”
The BBC reported on terrorist and war criminal Ariel Sharon – the Butcher of Beirut – telling Shimon Peres on October 3, 2001:
“Every time we do something you tell me Americans will do this and will do that. I want to tell you something very clear, don’t worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it.”
Peres had evidently been asking Sharon to respect American calls for a ceasefire.
“The US” is run by lobbies and pacs that operate on behalf of the elite. Israeli orgs don’t register under FARA so they are treated much more preferentially than every other country in the world. This was because of the work of their own people and agencies operating inside this country.
For anyone interested in how this came to be, Grant Smith does an excellent job running through the history in this hour-long video:
https://irmep.com/2023/05/aipacs-foreign-startup-funding/
In sum, the U.S. doesn’t control Israel, so condemning it for doing “nothing, not even a slap on the wrist” is frankly silly.
Israel must stop terrorizing Palestine and Israeli leaders must be put on trial for the crimes against humanity they themselves have committed in their own interests. This will not happen through the United States as it is currently configured.
Yes, obviously, but it’s not silly at all: you are being a bit an asshole for twisting my intent. I was merely pointing out that the US does not protect journalists, and they don’t give a fuck about their own citizens. No need to get shitty about it
Oh, and let’s not forget that notorious war criminal Tony Blair enjoys a lavish income and adulation from the press, while Assange is tortured in prison. The irony is not lost…