Off Topic The Politics Thread

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Should the UK remain a part of the EU or leave?

  • Stay in

    Votes: 56 47.9%

  • Get out

    Votes: 61 52.1%
  • Total voters
    117
  • Poll closed .
kiwiqpr said:
yes
i read it all
thats why i asked how long was austerity designed to last
will things change for the better at some stage
does a surplus need to hit a magic number
Click to expand...

Could somebody confirm whether the government’s austerity programme has only slowed down the rate of increase of expenditure over income, rather than put us in a position whereby income exceeds expenditure? I was of the impression that the deficit continues to increase, just not by as much as before.
 
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kiwiqpr said:
how long will austerity remain in place???

from the new york times


Britain’s Big Squeeze
In Britain, Austerity Is Changing EverythingIn Britain, Austerity Is Changing Everything
After eight years of budget cutting, Britain is looking less like the rest of Europe and more like the United States, with a shrinking welfare state and spreading poverty.
Raised in the Liverpool neighborhood of Croxteth, Emma Wilde has lost the welfare benefits she depended on to support herself and her two children.CreditAndrea Bruce for The New York Times

By Peter S. Goodman
  • May 28, 2018
  • For a nation with a storied history of public largess, the protracted campaign of budget cutting, started in 2010 by a government led by the Conservative Party, has delivered a monumental shift in British life. A wave of austerity has yielded a country that has grown accustomed to living with less, even as many measures of social well-being — crime rates, opioid addiction, infant mortality, childhood poverty and homelessness — point to a deteriorating quality of life.
    • When Ms. Lewis and her husband bought their home a quarter-century ago, Prescot had a comforting village feel. Now, core government relief programs are being cut and public facilities eliminated, adding pressure to public services like police and fire departments, just as they, too, grapple with diminished funding.
      By 2020, reductions already set in motion will produce cuts to British social welfare programs exceeding $36 billion a year compared with a decade earlier, or more than $900 annually for every working-age person in the country, according to a report from the Center for Regional Economic and Social Research at Sheffield Hallam University. In Liverpool, the losses will reach $1,200 a year per working-age person, the study says.





      “The government has created destitution,” says Barry Kushner, a Labour Party councilman in Liverpool and the cabinet member for children’s services. “Austerity has had nothing to do with economics. It was about getting out from under welfare. It’s about politics abandoning vulnerable people.”
      Conservative Party leaders say that austerity has been driven by nothing more grandiose than arithmetic.
      “It’s the ideology of two plus two equals four,” says Daniel Finkelstein, a Conservative member of the upper chamber of Parliament, the House of Lords, and a columnist for The Times of London. “It wasn’t driven by a desire to reduce spending on public services. It was driven by the fact that we had a vast deficit problem, and the debt was going to keep growing.”
      Whatever the operative thinking, austerity’s manifestations are palpable and omnipresent. It has refashioned British society, making it less like the rest of Western Europe, with its generous social safety nets and egalitarian ethos, and more like the United States, where millions lack health care and job loss can set off a precipitous plunge in fortunes.
      Much as the United States took the Great Depression of the 1930s as impetus to construct a national pension system while eventually delivering health care for the elderly and the poor, Britain reacted to the trauma of World War II by forging its own welfare state. The United States has steadily reduced benefits since the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s. Britain rolled back its programs in the same era, under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher. Still, its safety net remained robust by world standards.
      Then came the global financial panic of 2008 — the most crippling economic downturn since the Great Depression. Britain’s turn from its welfare state in the face of yawning budget deficits is a conspicuous indicator that the world has been refashioned by the crisis.
      As the global economy now negotiates a wrenching transition — with itinerant jobs replacing full-time positions and robots substituting for human labor — Britain’s experience provokes doubts about the durability of the traditional welfare model. As Western-style capitalism confronts profound questions about economic justice, vulnerable people appear to be growing more so.
      an analysis by the Institute for Government. Spending on road maintenance has shrunk more than one-fourth, while support for libraries has fallen nearly a third.
      The national court system has eliminated nearly a third of its staff. Spending on prisons has plunged more than a fifth, with violent assaults on prison guards more than doubling. The number of elderly people receiving government-furnished care that enables them to remain in their homes has fallen by roughly a quarter.
      In an alternate reality, this nasty stretch of history might now be ending. Austerity measures were imposed in the name of eliminating budget deficits, and last year Britain finally produced a modest budget surplus.
      But the reality at hand is dominated by worries that Britain’s pending departure from the European Union — Brexit, as it is known — will depress growth for years to come. Though every major economy on earth has been expanding lately, Britain’s barely grew during the first three months of 2018. The unemployment rate sits just above 4 percent — its lowest level since 1975 — yet most wages remain lower than a decade ago, after accounting for rising prices.
      In the blue-collar reaches of northern England, in places like Liverpool, modern history tends to be told in the cadence of lamentation, as the story of one indignity after another. In these communities, Mrs. Thatcher’s name is an epithet, and austerity is the latest villain: London bankers concocted a financial crisis, multiplying their wealth through reckless gambling; then London politicians used budget deficits as an excuse to cut spending on the poor while handing tax cuts to corporations. Robin Hood, reversed.
      “It’s clearly an attack on our class,” says Dave Kelly, a retired bricklayer in the town of Kirkby, on the outskirts of Liverpool, where many factories sit empty, broken monuments to another age. “It’s an attack on who we are. The whole fabric of society is breaking down.”

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      Workers from the Cammell Laird shipyard on the banks of the River Mersey. Once a center of the slave trade and gateway to the British Empire, Liverpool has long been in decline.CreditAndrea Bruce for The New York Times
      Austerity’s ‘Knock-on Effects’
      As much as any city, Liverpool has seen sweeping changes in its economic fortunes.
      In the 17th century, the city enriched itself on human misery. Local shipping companies sent vessels to West Africa, transporting slaves to the American colonies and returning bearing the fruits of bondage — cotton and tobacco, principally.
      The cotton fed the mills of Manchester nearby, yielding textiles destined for multiple continents. By the late 19th century, Liverpool’s port had become the gateway to the British Empire, its status underscored by the shipping company headquarters lining the River Mersey.
      By the next century — through the Great Depression and the German bombardment of World War II — Liverpool had descended into seemingly terminal decline. Its hard luck, blue-collar station was central to the identity of its most famous export, the Beatles, whose star power seemed enhanced by the fact such talent could emerge from such a place.
      Today, more than a quarter of Liverpool’s roughly 460,000 residents are officially poor, making austerity traumatic: Public institutions charged with aiding vulnerable people are themselves straining from cutbacks.
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      A fire station in Allerton, England, is one of several in the area that have closed because of austerity measures.CreditAndrea Bruce for The New York Times
      Over the past eight years, the Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service, which serves greater Liverpool, has closed five fire stations while cutting the force to 620 firefighters from about 1,000.
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      “I’ve had to preside over the systematic dismantling of the system,” says the fire chief, Dan Stephens.
      His department recently analyzed the 83 deaths that occurred in accidental house fires from 2007 to 2017. The majority of the victims — 51 people — lived alone and were alone at the time of the deadly fire. Nineteen of those 51 were in need of some form of home care.
      The loss of home care — a casualty of austerity — has meant that more older people are being left alone unattended.
      Virtually every public agency now struggles to do more with less while attending to additional problems once handled by some other outfit whose budget is also in tatters.
      Chief Stephens said people losing cash benefits are falling behind on their electric bills and losing service, resorting to candles for light — a major fire risk.
      The city has cut mental health services, so fewer staff members are visiting people prone to hoarding newspapers, for instance, leaving veritable bonfires piling up behind doors, unseen.
      “There are knock-on effects all the way through the system,” says Chief Stephens, who recently announced plans to resign and move to Australia.
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      The National Health Service has supposedly been spared from budget cuts. But spending has been frozen in many areas, resulting in cuts per patient. At public hospitals, people have grown resigned to waiting for hours for emergency care, and weeks for referrals to specialists.
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      Treating a patient at Royal Liverpool University Hospital. The National Health Service has supposedly been spared from budget cuts, but spending has been frozen in many areas.CreditAndrea Bruce for The New York Times
      “I think the government wants to run it down so the whole thing crumbles and they don’t have to worry about it anymore,” says Kenneth Buckle, a retired postal worker who has been waiting three months for a referral for a double knee replacement. “Everything takes forever now.”
      At Fulwood Green Medical Center in Liverpool, Dr. Simon Bowers, a general practitioner, points to austerity as an aggravating factor in the flow of stress-related maladies he encounters — high blood pressure, heart problems, sleeplessness, anxiety.
      He argues that the cuts, and the deterioration of the National Health Service, represent a renouncement of Britain’s historical debts. He rattles off the lowlights — the slave trave, colonial barbarity.
      “We as a country said, ‘We have been cruel. Let’s be nice now and look after everyone,’” Dr. Bowers says. “The N.H.S. has everyone’s back. It doesn’t matter how rich or poor you are. It’s written into the psyche of this country.”
      “Austerity isn’t a necessity,” he continued. “It’s a political choice, to move Britain in a different way. I can’t see a rationale beyond further enriching the rich while making the lives of the poor more miserable.”
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      Parts of central Liverpool that were rebuilt to attract tourists stand alongside largely neglected areas.CreditAndrea Bruce for The New York Times
      ‘Prosperity for All’
      Wealthy Britons remain among the world’s most comfortable people, enjoying lavish homes, private medical care, top-notch schools and restaurants run by chefs from Paris and Tokyo. The poor, the elderly, the disabled and the jobless are increasingly prone to Kafka-esque tangles with the bureaucracy to keep public support.
      For Emma Wilde, a 31-year-old single mother, the misadventure began with an inscrutable piece of correspondence.
      Raised in the Liverpool neighborhood of Croxteth, Ms. Wilde has depended on welfare benefits to support herself and her two children. Her father, a retired window washer, is disabled. She has been taking care of him full time, relying on a so-called caregiver’s allowance, which amounts to about $85 a week, and income support reaching about $145 a month.
      The letter put this money in jeopardy.
      Sent by a private firm contracted to manage part of the government’s welfare programs, it informed Ms. Wilde that she was being investigated for fraud, accused of living with a partner — a development she is obliged to have reported.
      Ms. Wilde lives only with her children, she insists. But while the investigation proceeds, her benefits are suspended.
      Eight weeks after the money ceased, Ms. Wilde’s electricity was shut off for nonpayment. During the late winter, she and her children went to bed before 7 p.m. to save on heat. She has swallowed her pride and visited a food bank at a local church, bringing home bread and hamburger patties.
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      Having lost electricity, Ms. Wilde and her children went to bed before 7 p.m. in the winter in order to conserve heat.CreditAndrea Bruce for The New York Times
      “I felt a bit ashamed, like I had done something wrong, ” Ms. Wilde says. “But then you’ve got to feed the kids.”
      She has been corresponding with the Department for Work and Pensions, mailing bank statements to try to prove her limited income and to restore her funds.
      The experience has given her a perverse sense of community. At the local center where she brings her children for free meals, she has met people who lost their unemployment benefits after their bus was late and they missed an appointment with a caseworker. She and her friends exchange tips on where to secure hand-me-down clothes.
      “Everyone is in the same situation now,” Ms. Wilde says. “You just don’t have enough to live on.”
      From its inception, austerity carried a whiff of moral righteousness, as if those who delivered it were sober-minded grown-ups. Belt tightening was sold as a shared undertaking, an unpleasant yet unavoidable reckoning with dangerous budget deficits.
      “The truth is that the country was living beyond its means,” the then-chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, declared in outlining his budget to Parliament in 2010. “Today, we have paid the debts of a failed past, and laid the foundations for a more prosperous future.”
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      A community center in Everton. It provides numerous services, like free lunches for the elderly, that were once done by government agencies.CreditAndrea Bruce for The New York Times
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      “Prosperity for all,” he added.
      Eight years later, housing subsidies have been restricted, along with tax credits for poor families. The government has frozen unemployment and disability benefits even as costs of food and other necessities have climbed. Over the last five years, the government has begun transitioning to so-called Universal Credit, giving those who receive benefits lump sum payments in place of funds from individual programs. Many have lost support for weeks or months while their cases have shifted to the new system.
      All of which is unfortunate yet inescapable, assert Conservative lawmakers. The government was borrowing roughly one-fourth of what it was spending. To put off cuts was to risk turning Britain into the next Greece.
      “The hard left has never been very clear about what their alternative to the program was,” says Neil O’Brien, a Conservative lawmaker who was previously a Treasury adviser to Mr. Osborne. “Presumably, it would be some enormous increase in taxation, but they are a bit shy about what that would mean.”
      He rejects the notion that austerity is a means of class warfare, noting that wealthy people have been hit with higher taxes on investment and expanded fees when buying luxury properties.
      Britain spends roughly the same portion of its national income on public spending today as it did a decade ago, said Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
      But those dependent on state support express a sense that the system has been rigged to discard them.
      Glendys Perry, 61, was born with cerebral palsy, making it difficult for her to walk. For three decades, she answered the phones at an auto parts company. After she lost that job in 2010, she lived on a disability check.
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      Last summer, a letter came, summoning her to “an assessment.” The first question dispatched any notion that this was a sincere exploration.
      “How long have you had cerebral palsy?” (From birth.) “Will it get better?” (No.)
      In fact, her bones were weakening, and she fell often. Her hands were not quick enough to catch her body, resulting in bruises to her face.
      The man handling the assessment seemed uninterested.
      “Can you walk from here to there?” he asked her.
      He dropped a pen on the floor and commanded her to pick it up — a test of her dexterity.
      “How did you come here?” he asked her.
      “By bus,” she replied.
      Can you make a cup of tea? Can you get dressed?
      “I thought, ‘I’m physically disabled,’” she says. “‘Not mentally.’”
      When the letter came informing her that she was no longer entitled to her disability payment — that she had been deemed fit for work — she was not surprised.
      “They want you to be off of benefits,” she says. “I think they were just ticking boxes.”
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      Dominic Barber and his family get significant help from the food pantry at the community center in Everton.CreditAndrea Bruce for The New York Times
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      An Unlikely Villain
      The political architecture of Britain insulates those imposing austerity from the wrath of those on the receiving end. London makes the aggregate cuts, while leaving to local politicians the messy work of allocating the pain.
      Spend a morning with the aggrieved residents of Prescot and one hears scant mention of London, or even austerity. People train their fury on the Knowsley Council, and especially on the man who was until recently its leader, Andy Moorhead. They accuse him of hastily concocting plans to sell Browns Field without community consultation.
      Mr. Moorhead, 62, seems an unlikely figure for the role of austerity villain. A career member of the Labour Party, he has the everyday bearing of a genial denizen of the corner pub.
      “I didn’t become a politician to take things off of people,” he says. “But you’ve got the reality to deal with.”
      The reality is that London is phasing out grants to local governments, forcing councils to live on housing and business taxes.
      “Austerity is here to stay,” says Jonathan Davies, director of the Center for Urban Research on Austerity at De Montfort University in Leicester, England. “What we might now see over the next two years is a wave of bankruptcies, like Detroit.”
      Indeed, the council of Northamptonshire, in the center of England, recently became the first local government in nearly two decades to meet that fate.
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      Knowsley expects to spend $192 million in the next budget year, Mr. Moorhead says, with 60 percent of that absorbed by care for the elderly and services for children with health and developmental needs. An additional 18 percent will be spent on services the council must provide by law, such as garbage collection and highway maintenance.
      To Mr. Moorhead, the equation ends with the imperative to sell valuable land, yielding an endowment to protect remaining parks and services.
      “We’ve got to pursue development,” Mr. Moorhead says. “Locally, I’m the bad guy.”
      The real malefactors are the same as ever, he says.
      He points at a picture of Mrs. Thatcher on the wall behind him. He vents about London bankers, who left his people to clean up their mess.
      “No one should be doing this,” he says. “Not in the fifth-wealthiest country in the whole world. Sacking people, making people redundant, reducing our services for the vulnerable in our society. It’s the worst job in the world.”
      Now, it is someone else’s job. In early May, the local Labour Party ousted Mr. Moorhead as council leader amid mounting anger over the planned sale of parks.
Click to expand...
That must be a record long post. I got sprained down roller finger syndrome trying to find the end of it!
 
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In October last year the Government announced that it was going to recruit 3-5,000 new customs officers. Whatever your Brexit colours more HMRC staff are obviously going to be needed to police new arrangements not only with the EU but with all the other countries we will trade with.

Since October last year HMRC headcount has fallen by nearly 3,000.

Uber_Hoop said:
Could somebody confirm whether the government’s austerity programme has only slowed down the rate of increase of expenditure over income, rather than put us in a position whereby income exceeds expenditure? I was of the impression that the deficit continues to increase, just not by as much as before.
Click to expand...
Me too. Austerity, and the level of austerity, is a policy choice. As one of the worlds most globalised economies the global crash of 2008 hit us harder than most. Although it’s popular to slag off Gordon Brown, his fiscal and monetary response to the crash was seen as a model and copied by many countries. Many less copied the austerity imposed by the coalition and then the subsequent Tory governments, as they recognised that government spending contributes to the economy, and turning off the tap has a huge ripple effect, beyond the direct beneficiaries of the spending. All other developed countries are now experiencing much higher economic growth than us, without the extreme austerity policies. Despite the masochism that our government has imposed on us (does that make it sadism?) to marginally impact a line on the budget sheet, our international credit rating has fallen, and the anecdotal and statistical impact on individuals and families has been negative and huge, as Kiwi’s post shows.

An illustration of the perverse impact of austerity. In October last year the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE) ruled that anybody who needed a cataract operation should get one as soon as possible (bet you thought that was the case anyway) rather than wait until eyesight had deteriorated beyond a certain point (near blindness) because not only is the operation very clinically effective (it nearly always works) it’s very cost effective - it saves the NHS money as the blinder you are the more likely you are to have accidents that need treating, broken bones, burns etc. Also of course if you have difficulty seeing you may have difficulty working, and therefore the tax take drops and benefits spend rises. Of the 175 local health groups 117 have not implemented this mandatory ruling because they cannot afford to.

However, the government has never hidden its spending intentions and we voted them in, so the electorate is accountable. What successive governments, and especially George Osborne, have done is be mendacious about the impact, promising us that the end is just around the corner and everyone would be richer.

At the end of the Great War a fund was set up to help reduce the national debt, which had risen from £650m in 1913 to £7bn in 1918. Such was the difference in the way people felt about their country and debt in those days that many people made donations to it, including small offerings from ex servicemen and relatively huge amounts from the rich (especially the Scottish rich, who were apparently offended by the notion of debt). The fund was never cashed in and now stands at £400m. Our government is asking for permission to use this money to spend on interest payments on the current debt - not to reduce the debt. For balance, a fund set up in the twenties or thirties by a rich couple in honour of their daughter who was killed in an attempt to fly over the Atlantic for a similar purpose was cashed in by Denis Healey to put in the pot for the IMF in the seventies, all £5m of it.
 
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kiwiqpr said:
dianne abbotts favourite too stroller:emoticon-0100-smile
Click to expand...

<laugh> Nicely put

I see Baroness Shami Chakrabati, who's never been elected to any political office, is telling us in relation to abortion in Northern Ireland, that the enforcement of Human Rights, as devised and stipulated by establishment-elite lawyers like herself and Cherie Booth, are more important than democracy itself. It beggar's belief.

Meanwhile, the unelected bureaucrats in Brussels are working with the Europhile ex-president in Italy to force an EU supporting puppet leader on the Italian electorate. It won't work. Italians will eventually force through an exit from the Euro imo, because they recognise the Euro has acted in favour of one dominant country, Germany, at the expense of their own economy.
 
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NHS guilty of 'ridiculous waste of resources' and could improve care without spending a penny more, top medic says

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Prof Keith Willett, medical director for acute care, urged people to do more to prevent beds being blocked by patients who should have been discharged
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28 May 2018 • 9:30pm
The NHS is guilty of a “ridiculous waste of resources” - and could improve care without spending a penny more, its most senior doctor says.
Prof Keith Willett, medical director for acute care, urged staff to stop “fuming” when the system “grinds to a halt” and instead do more to prevent beds being blocked by patients who should have been discharged.
He said too many surgeons were left unable to operate - sometimes on a daily basis - because of a failure to tackle bedblocking, with beds filled by those unable to discharged for want of help at home.
Writing for The Telegraph, the senior surgeon said that too often, the system had stopped functioning even before the first patient arrives for surgery....

not subscribing i cant see any more
does he say how much could be spent elsewhere treating patients
 
kiwiqpr said:
NHS guilty of 'ridiculous waste of resources' and could improve care without spending a penny more, top medic says

310
You must log in or register to see images

Prof Keith Willett, medical director for acute care, urged people to do more to prevent beds being blocked by patients who should have been discharged
You must log in or register to see images


28 May 2018 • 9:30pm
The NHS is guilty of a “ridiculous waste of resources” - and could improve care without spending a penny more, its most senior doctor says.
Prof Keith Willett, medical director for acute care, urged staff to stop “fuming” when the system “grinds to a halt” and instead do more to prevent beds being blocked by patients who should have been discharged.
He said too many surgeons were left unable to operate - sometimes on a daily basis - because of a failure to tackle bedblocking, with beds filled by those unable to discharged for want of help at home.
Writing for The Telegraph, the senior surgeon said that too often, the system had stopped functioning even before the first patient arrives for surgery....

not subscribing i cant see any more
does he say how much could be spent elsewhere treating patients
Click to expand...

I can't see any more, either, Kiwi, but there's an obvious (to me) reason for his views being the way they are. Care in the community, once you're out of hospital, isn't something the NHS does. It's Social Services, managed and paid for by the local councils. These councils are operating on far less money than they used to, in part because central government has reduced the money they get from central funds. Services have been cut. So, someone in hospital who could leave is being kept in because they don't have access to the care they need when they go home - often not medical care, but domestic support. The council can't provide it, so they stay in hospital and remain an NHS problem.

The answer would be to restore the funding the council needs so these people can go home and free up the beds. Hard to understand what NHS staff can do about that.
 
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kiwiqpr said:
Tommy Robinson And Reporting Restrictions
What happened yesterday to Stephen Yaxley Lennon, who styles himself Tommy Robinson, after he rocked up outside court in Leeds and was later arrested, shows that there are a lot of people out there who do not understand reporting restrictions put in place to ensure that those on trial receive a fair hearing. Lennon’s supporters largely do not want to know about this, and that is a pity - mainly for them.
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As is understood here on Zelo Street, there have been three separate trials in progress in Leeds of more than 20 individuals accused of being part of a grooming gang. Not all of the trails have yet concluded. As with other grooming gang trials, the prosecution has invested a great deal of effort in securing justice for the alleged victims; part of that effort is to ensure that outside interference is not allowed to compromise or even collapse the trial.
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That the trials had not all concluded was confirmed by the Independent’s report, which told “Lennon … had claimed that verdicts were due on Friday but court officials confirmed that the trial of nine defendants is ongoing”. West Yorkshire Police declined to comment when asked by the representative from the Evening Standard.
Free sheet Metro set out why Lennon was arrested: “He showed men entering the court on Facebook until he was approached by officers telling him to stop … Robinson is already under a suspended sentence over contempt of court at a gang rape trial in Canterbury last year … It is a criminal offence that can land people in jail”.
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Former prosecutor Nazir Afzal set out the potential pitfalls of breaking reporting restrictions: “We nearly lost the so called Rochdale grooming case ([HASHTAG]#ThreeGirls[/HASHTAG]) cos of a far right communication … Their lawyers applied at their trial that the jury had been prejudiced by Far Right We had to fight to persuade Court to allow trial to continue Those criminals came close to being freed & victims close to getting NO justice Jury must decide on EVIDENCE, not on your OPINION”. Others added their own cautions.
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Sharon Bottomley warned “It's because this trial has reporting restrictions which are there for a reason. The trial has been split as so many defendants and when all have been tried later this year then restrictions will be lifted. They cannot risk any coverage as all 3 trials linked”. And Mike Stuchbery concluded “Cases involving child sexual exploitation are generally highly restricted. There are so many things that (quite rightly) can't be made public. What he's done is hugely irresponsible”.
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}
Also, the warning given to Lennon by Judge Heather Norton at Canterbury Crown Court should be borne in mind. “In short, Mr. Yaxley-Lennon, turn up at another court, refer to people as ‘Muslim *****philes, Muslim rapists’ and so on and so forth while trials are ongoing and before there has been a finding by a jury that that is what they are, and you will find yourself inside. Do you understand? Thank you very much”.
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As Lennon’s actions are now linked inextricably to the continuing trial in Leeds, those reporting restrictions, and the contempt laws, still apply. They even apply to his Facebook page. That might be difficult for his supporters, and the likes of Lauren Southern, to comprehend. But that’s the way we ensure fair trials in the UK - for everyone.
It does not mean anyone’s free speech is being curtailed. That is all.

so stephen / tommy knew what would happen
mediawhore
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This is a very clear, very helpful summary from legal viewpoint on exactly what happened, and why.

https://thesecretbarrister.com/2018/05/25/what-has-happened-to-poor-tommy-robinson/
 
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