Conservatives crumble over human rights convention

EVERY now and then there’s a thundering proclamation that the dystopian days prophesised by George Orwell are upon us, usually to fit some particular political narrative. In ‘1984’ the Ministry of Truth was really the apparatus of propaganda, while the Ministry of Peace theatrically beat the drums of war. 

In reality this wasn’t a prophecy but an historic parable given a dramatic twist for effect. Whenever an arm of power says it is fighting for one cause, you can usually bet your house on it doing the exact opposite. 

Deep down everybody knows this, which is why hardly anybody bats an eyelid when a pious preacher declares that homosexuals will burn in lake of sulphur, and then is found at 3am weeping over the painted body of a teenage rent boy.

The Tories fit very nicely into this paradigm and it is hardly surprising that their latest internal controversy is over whether or not we should abandon the European Convention on Human Rights. 

Michael Gove and Theresa May are now at loggerheads over May’s announcement this week that she’d rather leave the convention than the EU, as the Brexit debate continues to spiral into auditions for the next leadership conference. 

This is obviously a matter of pressing importance to the British people who must be sick and tired of all the focus on hospitals and pensions, schools and jobs. 

Cameron, Gove, May, Johnson and their ilk pretend that they are looking out for the people’s best interests, but what they are actually doing is selling Britain and making its citizens mercenaries for the highest bidder. 

The army is sent around the world invading other countries and killing their people at the behest of a military industrial complex which sees us become bosom buddies with the Saudis, who are simply a more organised version of Daesh. 

Hospitals are being outsourced and privatised so as to bring more money to pharmaceutical companies, the chief executives of which send their children to the same schools as their pals in parliament. 

The United Kingdom is the most unequal country on the planet in respect to land wealth distribution, with a vast percentage of properties and estates having anonymous ownership and half the rural landscape being owned by less than 500 people. 

Meanwhile the urban property market has become a warped game of online poker for tiger-owning oligarchs, oil sheiks, and inbred gentry. 

It should be laughable that human rights legislation is being peddled as a major problem but then again, to paraphrase a dead American, democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.