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Jan 31 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
A Parliament that expels MPs for explaining that a pathological liar has lied becomes party to the lies.
It's our political system in microcosm: the liar survives, the whistleblower is ejected.
I looked up "whistleblower" on Thesaurus.com, and this is what it gave me. Perhaps it's a sign of how little we value those who tell the truth.
It's wrong to blame the Commons Speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, for this farce. He was upholding the rules, in a debate about upholding the rules. It's the rule forbidding MPs from accusing each other of lying that's ridiculous. Who could change that rule? Ah yes ...

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More from @GeorgeMonbiot

George Monbiot Profile picture
Feb 2
Boris Johnson has promised us “Freedom!” But it’s not us he’s liberating. It’s the asset strippers, money launderers, property developers and oligarchs who fund and defend him.
Their freedom is our misery.
My column.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
As the final stage of the Grenfell Tower inquiry has begun this week, I'd like to remind you of what was happening in another part of London on the day of the disaster, to show what the Conservatives mean by "freedom". I hope you're sitting down.
Thread/
On 14 June 2017, as the Tower burnt, the government’s Red Tape Initiative team met to discuss building regulations. It was due to consider whether rules governing the fire resistance of cladding materials should be scrapped, for the sake of construction industry profits.
Read 14 tweets
George Monbiot Profile picture
Feb 2
It's worth noting that the only pathologies both-sided by the curriculum are those that favour the powerful.

Biology students aren't taught that there are both positives and negatives to diphtheria ...
It's like the BBC's teaching materials, that provided an equal list of the positives and negatives of climate breakdown. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
It's as if young people's sense of justice, concern for others and for the living planet has to be pushed back into its box. It's as if growing up must involve abandoning your conscience and accepting the lies that power tells.
Read 4 tweets
George Monbiot Profile picture
Jan 28
For years I’ve been struggling with a paradox that seems fundamental to our age. We live under a system that celebrates freedom and choice. Yet almost everyone in a position of power or influence subscribes to the same set of preposterous beliefs.
Thread/
Here are a few of them.
- That economic growth can continue indefinitely on a finite planet.
- That the economic system should be granted primacy over the Earth systems that sustain it.
- That you should pledge allegiance to capitalism, even if you don’t know what it is.
- That natural wealth can be turned into private property, and the right of a person to own it corresponds to the numbers in their bank account.
- That the “invisible hand of the market” can one day solve our problems, though it has failed to do so to date.
Read 13 tweets
George Monbiot Profile picture
Jan 26
Last week I wrote about the dumping of used gillnets by French and Spanish boats* in Scottish waters. My contact has sent me more photos of dumped nets landed by local trawlers. I'll spare you the very distressing shots of seals and porpoises caught in them, but brace yourselves:
This ghost net has trapped hundreds of large fish, which would have died slowly as they were rolled over the seafloor. Gillnetting is extremely light and fine, so this probably amounts to several miles of net.
This one has picked up some large brown crabs, which are crucial to thriving ecosystems.
Read 7 tweets
George Monbiot Profile picture
Jan 26
I’ve been taking a lot of heat over the past week, stoked by certain Twitter accounts, on the grounds that I “support trophy hunting”.
I don’t. I hate it.
But I have been seeking to engage with complexities which some people refuse to acknowledge.
Thread/
These complexities affect some places, in some circumstances. They are not universal, but they are important. In these cases, trophy hunting currently helps to protect some crucial wildlife habitats and allows populations of highly threatened species to recover.
To give a few of many examples, trophy hunting has contributed to the remarkable rise in the number of both white and black rhinos in Namibia and South Africa, to the recovery of the Selous Reserve in Tanzania and to the protection of polar bears by Inuit communities in Nunavut.
Read 12 tweets
George Monbiot Profile picture
Jan 25
It's an atrocity on an unimaginable scale, overseen by two of our national heroes, Winston Churchill and John Maynard Keynes. 3 million deaths in India caused by a deliberate policy to ‘reduce the consumption of the poor’. By @jasonhickel
newint.org/features/2021/…
But most people in the UK have no idea. If we've heard of the Bengal Famine at all, we remember it as an act of God. It wasn't. It was the direct result of elective economic policy. It has been airbrushed from national consciousness as effectively as any Soviet crime.
It's a reminder that there's something very strange about the UK: a remarkable ability to blot out the past. No coercion or terror is required, just the British nod and wink. The same applies to the concentration camps in Kenya and many other atrocities
Read 6 tweets

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