#THREAD
By the end of her time as Secretary of State for Justice & Lord Chancellor, Liz Truss had lost the confidence of the entire legal profession & the judiciary. The Lord Chief Justice told the House of Lords Constitution Committee she was “constitutionally absolutely wrong”.
In November 2016, Truss was criticised by the former Attorney General Dominic Grieve & the Criminal Bar Association, for failing to support more robustly the judiciary & the principle of judicial independence, after judges came under attack from politicians & from the Daily Mail.
Lord Falconer, the former Lord Chancellor, who had previously suggested that, like her immediate predecessors Chris Grayling & Michael Gove, Truss lacked the essential legal expertise that the constitution requires, called for her to be sacked.
And in March 2017, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, told the House of Lords constitution select committee that Truss was "completely & utterly wrong" to say she could not criticise the media & reiterated the importance of protecting judges, which she failed to do.
Truss, like virtually every Tory politician since 1931, is incapable of criticising Jonathan Harmsworth's Mail, Frederick Barclay's Telegraph or Spectator, or Rupert Murdoch's Sun or Times, as she is entirely dependent upon them to act as vehicles for anti-opposition #propaganda.
Following Liz Truss's failure to criticise the Mail for its dangerously irresponsible 'Enemies of the People' front page, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas, said “I regret to have to criticise her as severely as I have, but to my mind she was completely & absolutely wrong.”
“I can understand how the pressures were on in November (2016), but she (Liz Truss) has taken a position that is constitutionally, absolutely wrong.”
It is was Truss’s duty, as lord chancellor, to defend the judges, the ex-Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas, said.
A Ministry of Justice spokesman said: “An independent judiciary is the cornerstone of the rule of law, & it is the duty of the lord chancellor to defend that independence.”
Coward Truss simply said she supported freedom of the press.
Who needs judges when you have the press?
The Tories would NEVER form a Government without the daily support of the toxic divisive billionaire-owned press, which is partly I believe #Leveson2, a Royal Commission, or an independent Public Inquiry is essential to protect Britain's fragile democracy.
Here's an article from 2016, criticising Liz Truss & powerfully asserting that far from being 'enemies of the people', in many other countries, judiciaries are rightly seen as defenders of freedom.
Without an impartial judiciary, democracy is dead.
In many countries like ours, which also have populist nationalist leaders & Governments, the judiciary is often the last line of defence of our freedoms: an independent judiciary can be a last bulwark against corruption, press censorship, & antidemocratic authoritarianism.
In 2020, the Law Society warned that the Government's proposed changes to the judicial review process would reduce the accountability of Government: some proposals "would allow unlawful acts by Government or public bodies to be untouched or untouchable."
Although Britain's legal system is on the verge of collapse, Dominic Raab refuses to meet leaders of the Criminal Bar, & the Tory voices calling for Britain to leave the ECHR - set up by Churchill after WWII to prevent another #Holocaust - grow louder.
Given Liz Truss's failure to protect the judiciary when she was Lord Chancellor, we can predict Liz Truss's response to the #barristerstrike. Please express your solidarity & get reliable information out about exactly why they're striking.
Life was demonstrably worse in the 1979 than it is today.
Zymunt Bauman calls this yearning for an imagined past, ‘retrotopia’, in which the ‘Volk’ (the ‘simple folk’, who Reform UK claim to represent) are constructed as homogenous, Christian, white, & ‘indigenous’.
Life was demonstrably inferior in the 1970s compared to today for almost everyone in England.
Life expectancy in the UK in 1980 was 71 for men and 77 for women. By 2019, life expectancy at birth in England had increased to 79 years for men & 83.5 for women.
1. Economic Hardship
In 1979, the UK economy was struggling with high inflation, unemployment, and a budget deficit. This eroded purchasing power, making essentials like food, clothing, and housing more expensive relative to wages. "Stagflation" was a significant problem.
'Anti-elite man of the people' Nigel Farage, educated at one of the most expensive private schools on earth, is now the highest paid MP in the UK. His basic annual MP salary is £91,346 plus expenses.
The UK National Living Wage for people aged 21+ is just £12.21/hour.
Let's take a look at some of Nigel Farage's additional earnings that he's legally obliged to declare in the MPs Register of interests - and which contains a few surprises - starting with GB "News".
Between 16th July 2024 and 15th January 2025, Farage decalred earnings of £264,790 for his work as a presenter on Reform UK Ltd's 24/7 propaganda channel, GB "News", co-owned by Islamophobic billionaire hedge-funder, Paul Marshall.
The front-page article, published in the Daily Telegraph, claiming “London is home to as many as 585,000 illegal migrants, equivalent to one in 12 of the city’s population” was covered across the media and widely discussed by politicians and others.
The claim that “One in 12 in London is illegal immigrant” is based on this report, commissioned by Thames Water, conducted by the research company Edge Analytics in February 2023, which the Telegraph says it obtained “under freedom of information-style laws for the environment”.
The EDL is an Islamophobic protest movement aimed at preserving UK identity and culture in the face of a perceived Islamization of the UK and Europe.
So is Reform UK.
The EDL reinforce the notion of the “nationalist subject” - a fallacious conception of citizenship - that wrongly assumes members of the majoritarian culture are possessed of certain core values, beliefs, and traits that embody the true essence of the nation.
🧵 Quite a few politically & historically illiterate brainwashed Trump-supporters replied or quote-tweeted the tweet below to tell me lifelong democratic socialist George Orwell was not in fact a democratic socialist. Truly Orwellian. So I asked Oligarch Musk's Grok about it...
In the preface to her newly reissued book, 'Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan - 30th Anniversary Edition', historian @NancyMacLean5 reflects on the resurgence of white power nationalism and political violence in contemporary America.
MaClean is known for her prescient best-selling 2017 book about the post–WWII conservative thinkers and policymakers who shaped the hyper-neoliberal #Project2025, 'Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America',
Evidence of why her prize-winning book has aged well and why @OxUniPress decided to republish it is obvious: numerous instructors continue to assign it, countless historians cite it, and the best Klan scholars have given it well-deserved praise.