Thread by @IRR_News

🚨 OUT NEXT WEEK🚨

#BritanniaEnchained, an audit of rights in the UK by IRR Vice Chair and former barrister @FrancesWebber5.

‘As the economy unravels, we are seeing an increasingly aggressive government squaring up to an expanding list of enemies’ 🧵

bit.ly/BritanniaEncha…

Over the course of last year, the government continued breaking laws, promises, conventions, codes, human rights obligations, & people - threatening the system of protecting human rights and the rights of specific groups. irr.org.uk/article/britan…

Boris Johnson & his successors continue to respond to every issue faced with increasing authoritarianism through supposed 'crackdowns' on protestors, investigative journalists, university campuses, striking nurses, ambulancemen, teachers, rail & postal workers, & ‘human rights’.

This all against a background of an impoverished and anxious population, a public sector in shreds, where morale and productivity are on the floor, beaten by a decade of cuts, and backlogs of cases in the courts and the NHS at equally insurmountable levels irr.org.uk/article/britan…

As 'take back control’ guided one of the headline issues of 2022: the treatment of asylum seekers, from the Rwanda deal, through Manston, to new prime minister Sunak’s ‘stop the crossings’ pledge - we see how this is accompanied by attacks on rights at the expense of community.

We are also shown how diversity in the cabinet allows ‘black and brown ministers … to front up attacks on black and brown people’ as @chakrabortty points out 👇
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

Sivanandan’s ‘The market state vs the good society’ described how a popular culture of ‘anti-immigrant, anti-scrounger patriotism’ was promoted to mask rising inequality & justify the ‘heavy manners’ used to keep the electorally unimportant in their place
asivanandan.com/the-market-sta…

‘Fake patriotism is deployed to justify the repression & demonisation of an ever spreading range of enemies' as they try to 'repair the leaks in the sinking ship of Britannia’

But on the ground ‘a turn towards the collective is detectable’ @FrancesWebber5
irr.org.uk/article/britan…

Read the introduction to #BritanniaEnchained, and look out for parts one and two dropping next week irr.org.uk/article/britan…

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