What a depressing time to be alive

THIS is the most depressing period in living memory when one looks at the current political scene in the UK.

The murder of the Conservative MP, Sir David Amess, has rightly seized public attention.

Much praise has been directed to the importance of surgeries as a key part of our democracy, but I find it profoundly ironic that praise for an MP’s bravery and professionalism comes at a time when elements of our democracy are to be most worryingly reduced by the Bills before Parliament. To skim the surface of these destructive measures: the Policing Bill will permit the authorities to terminate a protest that is found “to be too loud”.

How convenient this will be for the Government in power to reduce the activity of groups not to their taste. Would it not be incredible if, on the other hand, a football match could be cancelled if the racist chanting was found “to be too loud”?

The Judicial and Courts Bill can be used to reduce the legal accountability of the Government. Johnson’s government was prevented by our laws from ruling without parliament when he prorogued it. In future, are we to have no balance of power? Even Donald Trump couldn’t twist the legal system to that extent.

The Elections Bill will be used to reduce the trade union donations to the Labour Party. Meanwhile, donations to the Tory Party, direct or indirect, by Russian or Eastern European billionaires, will continue with the naked conceit that “all is above board”.

The demand for a photographic recognition document to be produced by all voters at future elections means that those without driving licences or passports might be excluded.

The redrawing of constituency boundaries is planned. Will the

Tory Party make sure that the new boundaries help them? And yet some of us still naively believe that the first duty of a democratic government is to protect the rights and freedoms of the citizen.

The crony approach to awarding contracts during the Covid crisis casts a further profound shadow over this Government. Letting “chums” make deals, with no tendering, on the backs of exhausted NHS workers and rapidly rising Covid death rates, doesn’t seem very British.

The removal of the £20 benefit uplift will move some 800,000 additional UK citizens into poverty (this figure comes from the Legatum Institute, led by a Conservative

Peer).

The Rowntree Trust states that in 2020/21, over one in five British people are already living in poverty, and Shelter tells us that 22% of rented properties are so badly maintained that they are causing ill health.

Meanwhile, the pay of the bosses of our top 100 companies is 86 times bigger than average income. Will the Tory policy of “levelling up” really reverse these figures?

And now the Tory Government is about to host the Cop26 environment conference in Glasgow, the most important meeting ever for the “health” of the world and the health of our grandchildren.

Mr Johnson has said that saving the environment will be “easier than Kermit the Frog said it would be” when addressing world leaders at the UN. So, to top it all off, our Prime Minister thinks that the climate crisis is a joke.

Jeremy Hall By email