If we don't act now, we have already signed democracy's death knell

If there's one thing to be learnt from 2016, it's that the concept of democracy is faltering. First we had the Brexit vote; a situation where large chunks of the population made an uneducated decision based on disinformation, and in many cases gave them license to unshackle their inner bigot. Now we have a real estate mogul being elected into the fabled job title of "the most powerful man in the world" and white supremacy is being propelled into the political mainstay. Meanwhile, an estimated 11,000 Americans voted for a dead gorilla to become the president.

As much as it pains me to say it, I prefer to see Trump in the White House than another Clinton presidency. Hillary is an efficient maniac, whereas Trump is an incompetent one. I also think I speak for everyone reading this when I say a world war with Russia is generally best avoided, something which would have been far from guaranteed if Clinton had been elected.

The most worrying aspect about Trump's victory is, like several other events which have occurred in recent years, further fuel has been pumped into the veins of racists and extreme nationalists worldwide. The French presidency is up for grabs in the spring of next year, and I am wholly expecting the vulgar Marine Le Pen and her xenophobic Front National to triumph. This is made all the more likely by the fact that half of the French people are currently petrified or disgusted by anyone wearing a hijab.

It's not just the US and France that is embracing authoritarian ideology either; fascist parties are on the ascent all over Europe and anti-immigrant/Islam rhetoric is only becoming more animated. As in America, the racist right can and will be defeated in Europe. But we must start grinding them back into the dust now. With every victory or event that provides them with encouragement, intolerance will only grow stronger if it doesn't receive a reaction.

I am in no way suggesting that democracy should be eradicated, but if we keep electing lunatics and hatemongers to the forefront of politics then what future do we have. I despise all forms of fascism but I would rather have a benevolent dictatorship, if there is such a thing, than to see a consortium of supremacists rule over us all. Trump is not the worst candidate to become president but his victory should serve as a bitter warning.

Europe turns its back on Syria and Yemen at its own peril

The images of the Syrian boy, Omran Daqneesh, being pulled from the rubble in Aleppo may have shocked the world over - but his wasn't a unique case.

Shedding tears for one injured child is simply not enough; the war in Syria has been raging on for 5 and a half years now and has decimated hundreds of thousands of men, women and children - many just like the bloody and dazed Omran. Dr Zaher Sahloul, who works in Aleppo, knows all about that. He has treated a toddler who had been shot in the head by a government sniper, children who had been mutilated by the shrapnel from barrel bombs and two young sisters who were brought into the emergency room hugging each other, but were already dead. And yet the airstrikes keep coming.

Somehow, Yemen is enduring a humanitarian catastrophe that is even larger than in Syria. For over a year now, two thirds of the population have had no access to clean water, 80% are in desperate need of humanitarian aid and thousands of civilians have died. The worst part about all of this? If the US and UK governments stopped flooding the Saudis with billions worth of weaponry, their bombing campaign - though let's call it for what it is: a war crime - would swiftly grind to a halt.

You may not believe it now, but Europe's destiny is entwined with events in its Arab neighbourhood in a way that the US's is not. For each Syrian refugee who made it to Europe and was treated decently, how many were left to rot in a war zone of the West's creation and will nurture resentment towards Europe? Similarly, reports are filtering out of Yemen that Yemenis perceive it not to be a Saudi bombing campaign but a US/UK bombing campaign, and many civilians blame the carnage on the West just as much as the Saudis.

You might not think that, you, a solitary individual, can do anything to change the US and UK's grotesque foreign policies. But if large swathes of the population became aware of the possibly irreversible damage the government is inflicting on the Middle east, I believe insurmountable pressure could be unleashed on those in power.

In a strange parallel to the events of last summer, the body of the little Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi washed upon the shores of Greece and just like now with Omran, there was an outpouring of sympathy on a global scale for refugees. However, just a few months later, Isis claimed responsibility for the deadly Paris attacks, the world relapsed and the migrant-bashing fanfare became rambunctious all over again.

For the reasons stated above, another terror attack in Europe is probably quite likely. Last time, a bunch of Belgian people killed a bunch of people in France so the British government voted to bomb more innocent people in Syria. There's no logic. We need to respond only with humanistic values, kids like Omran are dying every day. Think about it.

A new and sinister era has been ushered in

Originally posted on 29th June 2016.

The warning signs that we are entering a new epoch have been a long time coming, but the events which have occurred in the last few weeks have hurtled us towards it. The epoch I speak of, is one where casual racism and extreme nationalism rules and dictates the political weather.

If you've been living under a rock and haven't noticed, just take a look at the hate reports that have come flooding in over the past few days. Polish-origin schoolkids get cards calling them “vermin”, who must “leave the EU”. A halal butchers was petrol bombed in Walsall. A BBC reporter was called a paki in her home town. A TV correspondent notes that within five minutes three different people shout, “Send them home.” Neo-Nazi stickers being posted all over Glasgow. An 11 year-old girl racially abused in Sussex. Another child being told to go back to Romania, in the girls toilet at a school. More Nazi graffiti being daubed on walls in Belfast. Numerous people saying they voted to leave the EU to "keep the Muslims out". I've even seen someone post that their sister was racially abused and assaulted on the day we voted for Brexit. The list goes on.

No surprise, then, that anti-Muslim abuse soared by 326% last year. But this isn't just about Islamophobia anymore. The fetid build-up to the referendum and the result itself, has brewed a multi-headed attack; not just on Muslims, but anyone else who looks like their ancestry hasn't dwelled in England for the past 500 years. It's tempting to say, the solution would be to just legalise the execution of any human filth caught spouting racial abuse, on the spot. Although they don't deserve anything better than that, the catalysts for such wretchedness runs much deeper.

As it always has, xenophobia trickles down from the top. This is what happens when influential politicians and prime-ministerial wannabes (you know who I'm talking about), sprinkle their campaigns with the seeds of intolerance and bigotry. They don't just sprinkle it, they outrightly indulge and encourage their vulgarity. In times of uncertainty, there is always a place for a scapegoat. Disabled people had their benefits cut and were labelled as skivers by ministers last year, que a rise in hate crimes against people with disabilities. This time, the intensity has been cranked up and now, not just immigrants, but anyone who looks like one of their ancestors was an immigrant, has been made a target.

So, what can we do? Very little, unless we decide to burn the establishment overnight. That being unlikely, we need to prevent these quasi-fascist fuckwits, on all levels, from producing any more fertile ground. The referendum has been a masterclass in 'divide and conquer' tactics - I don't think the nation has ever been so carved up in my lifetime. But this must stop now. Without sounding a little bit sensationalist, hyper-nationalism and economic turmoil have had cataclysmic ramifications before. We are only a few false moves away from allowing that to happen again.

The EU is rotten but leave now and the Tories are left unshackled to mutilate the state

People are outraged that we may pay the EU up to £350 million a week. But if you mark the box next to Leave on Thursday, that statistic will be miniature in comparison to what your vote will entail.

It takes only a little perspective to offer some clarity in the gloomiest of situations. As both factions of the referendum campaign vamp up for the final days, millions of people will be voting to leave the EU, for completely delusional reasons. I appreciate that many of you don’t take an interest in day-to-day politics, but what is being sold to you by the plutocratic trio of Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Nigel Farage is a scam.

The focal argument for Brexit is that all the money being pumped into the EU will come flooding back into our public services. However, that money being paid to the EU is the least of a grim barrage of figures which are a slap to the face. Since they were elected in 2010, the Tories have been busy selling off public assets at an exponential rate, with the Royal Mail and the NHS being two of the most notable casualties. The latter now has a record deficit of £2.45 billion – the biggest overspend in its history and is a direct result of struggling to cope with a major budget squeeze. Many of the leading Brexiteers are on record as wanting to privatise the NHS. The fate of our health service really couldn’t be any more transparent if we vote to leave.

Another ugly statistic is the £555 billion the Chancellor George Osborne has racked up in debt, since he took office in 2010. To add insult to injury, Osborne has already warned of £30 billion more cuts to the NHS, schools and other public services, in the event of Brexit. The government’s actions raises two questions: how can anyone trust them to rebuild these public services with money we’d be saving from the EU, when they’ve already been working so hard to dismantle them? Secondly, where has all the money that has been stripped from our public assets gone? The first can only be answered by voters themselves but I’ll tell you where all this wealth has vanished to; our government hands a minimum of £93 billion to businesses and corporations each year – a transfer of more than £3,500 from each household in the UK. Just to put that into comparison, £1.2 billion is spent every year on benefit fraud, an argument which is supposedly one of the strongest for leaving the EU. Believe it or not, there’s a reason why we live in a country where the richest 20% now hold 105 times more wealth than the poorest fifth.

Leaving the European Union carries a price working-class voters literally can’t afford to pay. You only need to look at what the Tories have done in the past, without EU regulations, to see how they will act in the future. In 1981, the Thatcher government reluctantly agreed to introduce into British law obligations imposed by the European Union Acquired Rights Directive. This would protect the jobs and pay and conditions of employment of workers on transfer from one employer to another. However, the Tories excluded six million public servants when they introduced the regulations. The 10 years that followed were a privatisation frenzy, an auction on who could pay the least to the fewest, as tens of thousands were left with no protection on transfer. After years of campaigning and a shameful decade of mass privatisation, the workers took their case to the EU and won. As Paul Mason noted in a recent column, the likes of Johnson, Gove and Farage have fought all their lives for one objective: to give more power to employers and less to workers. Make no mistake, these men have absolutely no intentions of maintaining our rights at work if we leave the EU.

Perhaps the gravest threat to our society is the looming menace of TTIP. If you’re unfamiliar with this acronym, TTIP is the transatlantic trade and investment partnership and has two main strands: one is regulatory cooperation, which means standardising the laws on either side of the Atlantic. The other is investor-state dispute settlement, permitting companies to sue governments through an offshore tribunal if a law threatens their profits. If we vote to remain in the EU there is still no guarantee the deal will be prevented, but if we do leave it will certainly increase the chances of it being conceived.

If you’re still not worried, you only need to look at what happened in Romania. The government of Romania halted the production of a gold mine and swiftly found itself facing a massive lawsuit from a corporate mining giant in a secret “court”. The corporation has said it may seek up to $4 billion in "compensation", which is half of Romania’s annual public healthcare budget. If TTIP is passed through, such cases could become commonplace in Britain. It will almost certainly eradicate every democratic process in this country and will be a death knell for the NHS and other public services. Yet David Cameron is calling for "courage" to push it through. Do you really think he'll hesitate with Brussels out of the equation?

Brexit would also have a hugely detrimental effect on the environment. Overbearing private corporations would exploit the situation to demand the repeal of the Climate Change Act, the dismantling of the Department of Energy and Climate Change and push for even more fracking than is already currently in prospect. They would also urge for the removal of any remaining measures to encourage renewables, energy efficiency and community energy. The record of the Brexit cheerleaders offers no reassurance that they would resist any of this. Furthermore, the EU has provided us with a number of environmental benefits, including cleaner beaches, more rigorous action on air pollution and increased protection for UK nature. All of these advantages handed to us would likely to be wiped away.

The referendum has brought the worst out in some people, with casual racism and xenophobia rearing its ugly head and piercing the surface of our political discourse. The Leave campaign is the primary culprit and in recent weeks they have produced some truly odious propaganda. In the wake of the Orlando shooting on June 12^th, they fabricated a shameful piece of racist scaremongering, claiming that “Islamic extremism is a real threat to our way of life” and we face an “Orlando-style atrocity” if we don’t leave the EU. The master of chicanery, Nigel Farage, then went one step further. He unveiled a poster illustrating a vast queue of desperate refugees, with the headline “Breaking Point”, in a demonstration of his expertise at whipping up racial hatred. The poster was eerily reminiscent of one deployed by the Nazis.

Last week, the boundless torrent of fear and hatred which has been pumped into the veins of this EU debate reached boiling point. Thomas Mair, a far-right extremist, murdered Labour MP Jo Cox in her constituency, while shouting “Britain First”. It is still unclear whether or not he was referring to the far-right group of that name, although it is now known he had ties with neo-Nazi organisations. Atrocities like these aren’t caused by the overnight invention of racial superiority, but by the gradual evolution of a noxious political climate. Just as we like to talk about the radicalisation of Islamic extremists, the catalysts for this racial extremism need to be named and shamed; tabloids such as the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and The Sun, far-right groups like Britain First and outright neo-Nazi groups like National Action, as well as many individual members of our political institutions and media. Poverty, low pay and the sanctioning of benefits are not caused by immigrants; they are a direct result of the ideological austerity fermented by this Tory government.

The truth is, there is no right or wrong answer on the EU referendum, although even if we remain we face a punishing few years until we have a change in government. However, I can confidently say that affairs are going to get much worse if we decide to leave. The EU has become a gerrymandered dinosaur, which allowed the most left-wing government in Europe plunge into financial chaos. But it still offers the British public protection on many levels. One major criticism of the EU is that it failed to block the Tories’ trade union bill, which would stem the flow of political funding to opposition parties. Even though it didn’t prevent the bill, it raises the question, why would you want the country’s security to be left solely in the hands of these people? The trade union bill, after all, is a gleaming example of things to come in the event of Brexit.

A post-Brexit government would be sculpted in the images of Johnson and Gove, and everything they have ever achieved suggests they would turn Britain into a Thatcherite’s wet dream. It may have escaped your notice, but on numerous public appearances in recent weeks, David Cameron has been attempting to soak all the blame being fired at the Conservative party onto himself. Forget divisions within the Tories’, the Prime Minister’s subtle ploy is to ensure the legacy of his party remains intact for many years to come. This can’t be allowed to happen. You won’t be getting your country back if you vote to leave, you’ll be seamlessly placing it into the hands of the most right-wing government seen in years.

Regardless of whether we leave the EU or not, a financial crisis is probably around the corner. It was reported only two weeks ago, that the megalomaniacs and government overlords of Britain had taken £65 billion out of the British economy in just March and April alone. Our chancellor has created a gargantuan debt and this country faces grave repercussions. This should serve as a final warning to vote remain, so the Tories at least have some restrictions on their venomous assault on the state. If we leave, they’ll be left unshackled to run riot in a manner we haven’t seen since the 1980’s.
We should then seek to replace those in government at the next possible opportunity.

Our democracy is broken but to win it back we must work with democratic forces across Europe, not by cutting ourselves adrift. The EU may never be rebuilt and if that is the case there will be a time to leave. But that time will be when we have a measure of stability, when we have a Labour government.