On The Queen's Speech of 2016

The Queen's Speech of yesterday outlined some of the most worrying plans the Conservatives have come up with in recent years. Here are 5 key reasons why the Queen's Speech 2016 means danger:

1. They plan to replace the Human Rights Act with a weakened a watered-down British Bill of Rights.

Given how much the Human Rights Act has achieved, with the most recent example being justice for the 96 victims of the Hillsborough Stadium disaster of 1989, and the Conservatives' attitude to respect for human rights (nationally and internationally) especially whilst Theresa May has been Home Secretary, this will in all likelihood end up being disastrous in practice. We should instead keep the Human Rights Act and remain part of the European Convention of Human Rights, which Britain helped with the foundations of back in 1948.

2. They have not really U-turned on their 'all schools to become academies' plan after all.

The Conservatives and their Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan, still want to achieve a goal of making as many schools academies as possible even if they ever dropped plans to compel them to convert. Also, decisions about what constitutes an 'unviable' authority with regards to plans to convert underperforming schools in unviable authorities to academies will be clearly biased against less affluent areas and smaller councils.

3. Their deregulation of the university 'market' will mean ever-increasing fees and poorer higher education standards.

The barriers on new universities set up exist for a reason-to make sure only genuinely educational institutions can set up an accredited university and offer accredited courses to prospective students. More worryingly, allowing more prestigious universities to set fees as high as they can could create a permanent, class-based two-tier system in university terms akin to the current schools system.

4. The Snoopers' Charter is going to be pushed through, as is a dangerously broad 'Counter-Extremism' Bill.

We already have enough surveillance in our lives as it is, and this proposed Investigatory Powers Bill will allow retention of any of our private communications for investigation even when it is useless to the government. Also, the proposed counter-extremism bill could identify almost anyone involved in politics in some way as an extremist even when they are clearly not.

5. Effective privatisation of prisons is in the works.

Allowing prisons to contract in private suppliers for key areas could substantially lower effectiveness and undermine the main purpose prisons are meant to serve-effective rehabilitation of offenders who have committed serious enough crimes to be imprisoned in the first place. This could also lead to further prison overcrowding which has dangerous consequences; we instead need reform of our justice and prison systems. http://www.thecanary.co/2016/05/18/queen-just-announced-privatisation-prisons-nobody-noticed/






Comments

  1. Andi20 May 2016 at 10:19

    Hi Alan

    Good points.

    I enjoy reading your blog but I've been finding it hard to read - literally - since you changed your colour scheme. The green on green doesn't have enough contrast for me to comfortably read.

    A lot of people don't realise websites have accessibility standards which specify among other things, how much contrast is needed for the vast majority of your visitors to read your text. The contrast you've got here is about 2:1. Ideally contrast should be above 5:1.

    There's a helpful calculator here:
    http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/

    (Your background colour is #66A189 and text is #17714C)

    All the best
    Andi

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Alan B20 May 2016 at 10:53

      Dear Andi,

      I have now changed all the text to red instead of green. Do you find it easier to read now?

      Alan.

      Delete
  2. Andi23 May 2016 at 10:13

    Hi Alan

    Love the redesign! Thanks :)

    Andi

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The English local elections of 2023-Conservatives pay the penalty for failing to put a stop to sleaze and sewage in our rivers

The English local elections of 2023 (Northern Ireland's elections will finish next week and a separate blog post will be devoted to these) not only resulted in more than 1000 Conservative losses just as Rallings & Thrasher and Sir John Curtice predicted, they also resulted in sweeping Green and Liberal Democrat gains across the nation-sending a hard message to the Conservatives about the need to protect our environment and Labour for barely acting like an opposition at all. The Conservatives in total made a net loss of 1,061 seats, with the vast majority being in the shire districts where they once dominated-even councils such as Bracknell Forest and Surrey Heath, which they held in 1995 and 2019, fell, to Labour and the Liberal Democrats respectively in those two cases. Who they lost to varied widely by the nature of the authority-their losses to Labour came mainly in (ex) industrial "Red Wall" areas where they had made against-the-trend gains in 2019 or fared better
Read more

My analysis of the Swedish general election of 2022

The Swedish general election of 2022 generated some surprising results, despite also averting pollsters' predictions significantly. The last three years in particular proved to be a rough ride for the Social Democrat led governments of Stefan Lofven and Magdalena Andersson respectively. Although Sweden's laxer approach to the COVID-19 pandemic (compared to most countries in Europe, which imposed lockdowns during much of 2020 and 2021, an approach that arguably caused more problems than it solved) proved effective, Mr Lofven's desire to lift the austerity tax (which only affected a wealthy minority, similar in nature to the wealth tax initiative of former French President Francois Hollande) and to join NATO proved contentious, with two of the Social Democrats' former coalition partners (the Swedish Greens and Swedish Left Party, who had both pulled out of confidence and supply) unsurprisingly voting against Swedish accession to NATO membership (all other parties in the R
Read more

On the 2020 Serbian election: Why a boycott will only worsen things there

First of all, I apologise for the recent hiatus; however elections are still postponed or on hold in many countries, including the UK. Serbia, however, was able to proceed with its 2020 general election amidst this crisis. Its overall result proved reminiscent of Hungarian elections under Viktor Orban's tenure (2010-present), since the leading national-conservative coalition, the SNS (Progressive Party of Serbia) coalition led by Serbian President Aleksander Vucic (Ana Brnabic is the Serbian Prime Minister, and the first woman and openly homosexual person to hold that position), polled 61.6% of the vote, giving them as many as 191 seats out of 250 and a majority of as high as 132, almost unheard of in any country with proportional representation. Press freedom has endured significant curbs since President Vucic first came into power as Serbian PM in 2012 (he became President of Serbia in 2017), as have civil liberties of Serbs in general. Nepotism and corruption in the Serbian
Read more