Thread by @LiamSpender

1/13 A shameful day for British democracy today.

The Commons voted 250-232 to delay considering the report on sanctioning Owen Paterson for paid advocacy (mainly failing to declare he was a paid lobbyist for food products firms when approaching gov't departments and regulators)

2/13 MPs also voted to establish a new committee to consider whether to set up a new system for investigating complaints about MPs' conduct.

MPs then voted 248-221 for this new system, and the delay to Mr. Paterson's case, to take effect.

3/13 The remedy above is not available to any ordinary citizen.

If you are convicted of a crime and the law changes, you don't get a retrial unless there is some reason to doubt the original decision under the law as it applied at the time.

4/13 And these developments of loosening the rules around MPs conduct come after a torrid 2 years that has seen:

(a) a Health Secretary making decisions on health spending whilst also being a shareholder in his sister's company benefitting from health spending.

5/13 (b) Billions of pounds of public money to buy PPE and COVID testing kits given to people with connections to the Conservative Party.

(c) The Chairman of Homes England approving a £187 million loan to a company for which that same Chairman was simultaneously a paid adviser.

6/13 (d) The PM refusing to identify who had paid for his Downing Street flat to be refurbished, then saying he'd paid for it, then it being revealed that the bill had actually been met by a Tory donor on unknown terms before being passed back to the PM.

7/13 (e) The government bringing forward new laws to try and neuter judicial review by limiting it, or denying it all together in decisions over dissolution or prorogation of Parliament, whilst also making it harder to protest effectively.

8/13 What happened today, and what has been happening in the last 2 years, wouldn't have looked out of place in the State Duma in Russia or the Parliament of Zimbabwe.

We seem only to be be missing state-sanctioned poisoning of government critics.

9/13 We seem to be living in an increasingly lawless and crooked country.

The police have been silent on all of the examples above.

All that seems to matter is how wealthy you are and how politically well connected you are.

10/13 The same is true when it comes to trying to obtain justice in the courts.

In recent years, all the major Russian and CIS oligarchs have had cases in the English High Court that have occupied months of court time between them.

11/13 Meanwhile, lower level civil and criminal courts are starved of resources, with enormous backlogs.

The police claim they lack the resources to investigate even glaring cases of fraud, like this one: bbc.in/2ZTKfDC

12/13 And the voters seem to love it.

Boris Johnson was voted into office in December 2019 by 13.96 million people, more than Margaret Thatcher in 1983 (13.01 million) and Tony Blair in 1997 (13.52 million).

13/13 We cannot rely on politicians to do the right thing.

It is up to us to supervise what is done by them in our name.

Unless the people fulfil their duty to oversee their politicians this behaviour will continue.

If we tolerate this, what comes next will be worse.