owen-jones

Our universal right to legal representation has been cut to shreds by Tory austerity – and women are the worst affected

Boris Johnson is a very rich man, even though he suffers from a self-pitying syndrome that afflicts many of the well-off: believing himself to be poorer than he actually is. Although he once described his £250,000-a-year newspaper column salary as “chicken feed”, and reportedly complained that his prime ministerial annual pay packet of more than £150,000 wasn’t enough to live on, he was already in the top 1% of earners when he lived in No 10.

And he has only prospered since, having moved into a £3.8m Oxfordshire mansion –with nine bedrooms and a moat on three sides – and earned well over £5 million since resigning from the prime ministerial office in disgrace.

Austria, France, Germany, Sweden and now Spain – the firewall between the mainstream and the far right is crumbling

Normalisation is the process by which something unusual or extreme becomes part of the everyday. What once provoked horror and outrage soon barely registers. The way the presence of Donald Trump became a mere fact of political life is perhaps the most familiar example. But the normalisation of the far right is happening across the democratic world.

Once Trump became “normal”, events that seemed even more extreme did too. A 2022 survey found that two in five Americans thought civil war was “at least somewhat likely” in the next decade. One political scientist speaks of the possibility of rightwing dictatorship in the US by 2030.

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

Imagine your boss being fined for calling you after hours. In some European countries, that’s already a reality, and Labour wants us to follow suit

The idea of a clear demarcation between work and life is, for most people, an absurd joke: your life is being invaded, and you have no line of defence to protect yourself. Even if they are thousands of miles from their desk, a worker may still feel chained to it. Text messages and emails can arrive at ungodly hours, demanding prompt replies. Parents may find the nightly ritual of putting their kids to bed is interrupted by a panicked phone call from their boss. Almost as stressful is the idea that, as you collect your belongings to leave the office, you know you can never really leave: somehow, wherever you are, you remain at work.

Here is why “the right to disconnect” has become one of the great emancipatory causes for workers, and could be headed for Labour’s next manifesto. For example, Portugal introduced a law at the beginning of last year that imposes a legal duty on bosses not to contact their workers outside of defined working hours. There is one exception – circumstances of force majeure – but otherwise, companies could be fined up to €9,690 (£8,400). In part, this is a response to the phenomenon of working from home: in Britain, 37% of employees now report working from home at least some point in the previous week. While this trend has been liberating for many workers, the Portuguese authorities found it could be exploited by bosses disregarding the idea that a remote worker ever clocked off.

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

The Tories must be thrown out of office, but I am also concerned about what a Starmer-led majority would mean for the country

The best outcome for the next election will not appear on the ballot paper, and is already the target of a hostile and escalating press campaign. It hardly needs to be said that a renewed mandate for Tory rule will be an obvious catastrophe for the country. No government in British democratic history can be considered such a devastating failure, whether on objective measures – weak growth, an unprecedented squeeze in living standards, declining life expectancy and crisis-ridden public services – or on its own terms.

To its critics, Margaret Thatcher’s administration represented a nightmare, but its cheerleaders can recite a long list of what they would consider proud achievements: mass privatisation, smashing trade union power, slashing taxes on the rich and flogging off council houses. What would an equivalent score card look like for 13 years of Tory rule? Brexit is its defining innovation – and who even pretends that’s going well these days?

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

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The Public Order Act shows how this Tory government is hollowing out our democracy. Here’s how we must defend it

Democratic freedoms are hard won and easily lost. Rights secured after generations of struggle – by citizens risking their safety, liberty and, indeed, lives – can be stripped away in weeks with barely a murmur. Such is the fate of the right to protest, which has now been redefined in the UK as a privilege that exists at the discretion of the police. This weekend, dozens of peaceful protesters advocating republicanism – a cause backed by around a quarter of the population, or well over 13 million British adults – were arrested. The Metropolitan police has since expressed regret at the arrest of six of them belonging to the Republic group, including its head, Graham Smith, but it is rather too late, not least because such repressive behaviour has a chilling effect that deters others from protesting.

The basis of their arrest offers an instructive lesson about how freedom is lost. All six of the Republic protesters were apprehended under the new Public Order Act, which allows for protesters to be arrested on suspicion of intending to “lock on” – that is, to fix themselves to a target. In the case of these six arrested protesters, the “lock-on equipment” was luggage straps to gather placards. When these laws are passed, opponents who warn they will be enforced far beyond their supposed remit are accused of hyperbole and scaremongering, yet they are invariably proven correct. Unless our politicians are completely stupid, they must be aware of how frequently legislation is used to curtail peaceful protest – and therefore we must conclude this is, in part, the intent. Given that the separate Policing Act allows for protests to be suppressed if they are deemed too noisy – protests are, almost by definition, noisy – this reasoning seems beyond dispute.

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

No leader of a major political party has so comprehensively junked their leadership platform in British democratic history

This week, Keir Starmer finally abandoned his commitment to scrap university tuition fees, one of the last remaining concrete pledges he made to Labour members when he sought their votes three years ago. His dishonesty is not a moral issue, but rather a warning about the type of government he is likely to form next year.

When interrogated by Andrew Neil in March 2020 about whether university tuition fees would be scrapped as part of his general election manifesto, he answered, “They’re all pledges, Andrew, so the answer to these questions is yes.”

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

The sacked Fox News host was one figurehead of a misinformation industry that has reshaped rightwing politics across the world

It is difficult to begrudge anyone for celebrating the downfall of far-right provocateur Tucker Carlson, ignominiously ejected from Fox News. Slack-jawed, spitting rage, his tirades were calculated at stirring the resentment of angry white America: from declaring that immigrants made the US dirtier and poorer to embracing the “great replacement theory”, which spreads the noxious lie that the authorities were deliberately “undermining democracy” by replacing US-born Americans with immigrants.

Fox staff were reportedly jubilant at his departure. Perhaps this quote from a Fox reporter, in which they celebrate seeing the back of the network’s premier conspiracy theorist, will give you pause: “It’s a great day for America, and for the real journalists who work hard every day to deliver the news at Fox.”

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

The problem is not moral decay. It’s the withering away of our living standards, security and wellbeing

If there is such a thing as an onward march of human progress, it has not just halted, but screeched into reverse. Last autumn, a little-discussed report issued by the United Nations noted that human development had declined in 90% of countries for two years in a row, a fall without precedent for more than three decades. The pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine played their role, but so too did “sweeping social and economic shifts, dangerous planetary changes, and massive increases in political and social polarisation”.

You may well be familiar with chatter about “the decline of the west”: it has tended to be the preserve of the reactionary right, who blame, variously, moral decay, multiculturalism and a reassessment of European history for our downfall. But it is not minority rights, diversity or acknowledgment of western crimes to blame. The turnaround in our collective fortunes has been dramatic. But it is driven by an economic system that promised personal freedom but instead delivered insecurity on a mass scale, and which has has hurt us in every conceivable way, from our emotional and physical wellbeing to our material circumstances.

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

Making possession illegal will criminalise young people and boost criminal gangs. It’s another vote-chasing stunt from ministers

We can predict with some precision what will happen when the government criminalises the possession of nitrous oxide. Hundreds of thousands of young people will still inhale this laughing gas from balloons. Criminal gangs will take charge of meeting the demand, handing them a new and lucrative revenue stream. Our ability to regulate the substance will cease, posing greater risks.

Those who need medical care will be deterred from seeking it, fearing being pursued by the police. A minority of users will be arbitrarily criminalised – in the words of the Law Enforcement Action Partnership, which represents former police officers, for “possessing substances which have a lower harm rate than ‘legal’ highs such as alcohol”. Because of an institutionally racist criminal justice system, those targeted will be disproportionately Black, their future job prospects damaged for enjoying a quick high from a balloon.

Only a small proportion of rape, burglary and violent crimes are actually solved by the police

The Metropolitan police cannot be reformed: it must be given its final rites and buried for good. I made this argument in the first column I ever wrote for this newspaper, nearly a decade ago: the case is surely even more compelling now.

By finding “institutional racism, sexism and homophobia” within the force, Louise Casey and her review have underlined a basic fact: most of the capital’s population cannot trust the Met with their safety. It is, as Doreen Lawrence puts it, “rotten to the core”. It took the murder of her son for London’s police force to be first damned for “institutional racism” by the Macpherson report nearly quarter of a century ago. And yet nothing changed, aided by a culture of denial among politicians, such as the then-Labour justice secretary, Jack Straw, who said, a decade later, the judgment no longer applied.

For years, the toxic right have pulled the national debate in their own direction. The mass BBC rebellion showed how we can pull it back

The BBC’s humiliating climbdown over its attempted silencing of Gary Lineker is a milestone. For years, emboldened rightwingers have succeeded in driving the national political conversation ever further in their direction. They’ve achieved this in two ways: first, by treating progressive political opinions as illegitimate; and second, by simultaneously claiming that it’s rightwingers who are really being silenced, a truly shameless spectacle of crybullying.

It continues to this very day. Witness Richard Littlejohn’s column in the Daily Mail. “Endless strikes, the small boats crisis and now the Lineker fiasco are proof that anti-Tory groupthink has taken control in Britain”. Risible. And predictable.

Global heating is the fault of rich countries, but they will stop at nothing to prevent the world’s most deprived from finding a safe home

Consider Abdul, a 26-year-old Darfuri refugee whose fellow villagers were burnt to death by Janjaweed, an Arab-supremacist militia. Think of Parwaiz, a cherubic 15-year-old Afghan boy with striking blue eyes, his father blown apart by a Taliban bomb. Or ponder the case of Hayat, who fled Eritrea – ruled by a regime that rivals North Korea for totalitarian repression – after his friends were arrested.

All of these are refugees I met in Calais, seeking to cross the Channel for British shores. All suffered horrors unimaginable to most people reading these words, and all would be automatically deported and banned from returning under Rishi Sunak’s new plans. When the Tory MP Neil O’Brien declares, “We must do whatever it takes to stop the boats,” you may doubt that he really means there are no limits to what this government is prepared to inflict on these traumatised human beings, until you remember they once refused to rule out using wave machines.

It took the LGBTQ+ community, educated by the trauma of HIV and Aids, to fill a vacuum left by government failure

Harun’s nightmare began with a fever, a general sense of being under the weather. Maybe it was Covid, he thought. Then his temperature soared to over 40C, and his muscle aches soon became unbearable. A pimple appeared on his nose, and swiftly spread across his face. He called an ambulance half a dozen times, but none arrived. As his throat became covered in lesions, he could no longer swallow food. It was then he was finally admitted to hospital, and spent 11 days there in agonising pain.

Harun had been infected with mpox – formerly known as monkeypox. There have been more than 3,500 confirmed cases in the UK since last spring, but here’s a crucial detail: it was overwhelmingly men who have sex with men who were affected. An emerging infectious disease, affecting a historically marginalised community, in a Covid-weary media environment – the response to mpox could have been a disaster. Thanks to the government, it very nearly was. But mpox was contained in the UK because of the work of queer campaigners determined not to let a public health crisis or moral panic erupt.

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here

As problems in the UK grow, excluding members with more transformative ideas may harm the party in the long run

Triumphalism reigns in Keir Starmer’s operation. For the factional warriors surrounding the Labour leader, sparring with Tories is business but crushing the left is pleasure. Banning Islington party members from reselecting Jeremy Corbyn as their Labour candidate is an act they relished. When he was courting the votes of Labour activists in 2020, Starmer declared that “local party members should select their candidates for every election”: but as this latest move underlines, the Labour leader is as interested in due process as he is in abiding by the solemn campaign pledges he made.

The purging of Corbyn is just one example underlining the nature of Starmerism. As a political project, it intends to permanently eradicate the left from the Labour party, and thus – given a first-past-the-post system Starmer has no intention of reforming – almost entirely from English politics.

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

The promotion of Lee Anderson reveals a lot about who is and who isn’t considered working class in Britain

Boris Johnson’s Brexit has been a dismal failure, heralding only falling investment and stagnant growth. If you want an admission of this truth, look no further than Saturday’s revelation of a secretive, two-day cross-party summit of remainers and leavers that took place last week in a grand Oxfordshire retreat to address this national fiasco.

But let’s not forget who the victims are here: as in all crises, it is the working class who suffer the most from our politicians’ malice – the same people Tory Brexiteers deceitfully claimed to champion, but know nothing about.

Of all the places to find a heartening queer love story: the apocalypse. This TV series is a major cultural milestone

Love finds many expressions, but its sole certainty is that it always ends. This inescapable reality underpins much of human culture: what is most art, music, theatre, cinema and television other than an attempt to grapple with the emotional turmoil that results?

A devastating new contribution to this artistic tradition finds an unlikely home in episode three of the new HBO series The Last of Us. Unlikely, because it is based on a popular video game, set in an apocalyptic alternative universe in which most of humanity has been reduced to zombie-like cannibals. What remains of our species is confined to totalitarian quarantine zones and desperate raiding parties. This is not conventionally fertile ground for romance.

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

I didn’t have a proper vocabulary to talk about loss, but discovered that breaking the taboo was vital for healing

Did my father know that his death was imminent? After he was wheeled back to my parents’ flat in Edinburgh for his last Christmas five years ago, delusion seemed to prevail. He was getting better, he reassured me; then aged 72, he insisted would make it to his 80s. But his eyes seemed to suggest otherwise: there was something about how they welled up as I blared Edward Elgar’s Nimrod from the living room speakers. He loved that variation. My mother hasn’t been able to listen to it since, because it’s one of those emotional landmines that grief lays after a bereavement. Why stand on it, if you have the choice?

Just over two weeks later, he was dead, but he wouldn’t have felt disappointment in that moment of finality. Sometimes I wonder if he could hear his family in that hospice, whispering their love, or the baritone notes of the Bruce Springsteen songs we played. Before he fell ill, he used to loop around his armchair, clicking his fingers and roaring out the chorus as he listened to the Boss. His eyes seemed to moisten in those final moments, too. But was this a silent emotional response to his family wishing him farewell, or just another symptom of a human body shutting down for good?

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

A deadly, avoidable crisis is under way, fuelled by NHS cuts, the neglect of social care, inequality and the soaring cost of living

When most people hear that phrase “humanitarian crisis”, they think “abroad”, “somewhere far away”, and certainly not in Britain. But how else to describe the tens of thousands of bodies avoidably piling up in the nation’s mortuaries? One funeral home worker says that they’ve run out of spaces for the deceased and “are having to keep some encoffined in office rooms”; another hospital porter reports that the mortuary has been near capacity for two weeks. This national issue should be splashed on every front page and leading every bulletin. It isn’t: why?

Last year in the UK there were nearly 40,000 excess deaths – that is, deaths above a five-year average. That’s nearly as many as were killed by the Luftwaffe in the blitz. In the last two weeks of 2022, deaths were a fifth higher than the average from 2016 to 2019 (the last pre-pandemic year), and that’s taking into account factors such as a bigger, ageing population.

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

More people than ever before have declared themselves as not heterosexual, but, sadly, the trans community still faces adversity

The 2021 census results for the first time paint LGBTQ people on the national canvas. Just over 3% of the population of English and Welsh citizens have declared themselves not to be heterosexual, a similar proportion to that estimated by the Office for National Statistics, which suggests a doubling in number since 2014. That isn’t, of course, because homophobic fantasies have been realised – that, if permissible, homosexuality will spread like an infection – but because increased social acceptance has allowed LGBTQ people to realise their authentic selves.

The fluidity of sexuality is observable in the results: there are nearly as many bisexual and pansexual people as there are gay or lesbian. This justifies the complaints of campaigners about a phenomenon called “bi-erasure”: where bisexual people are often left out of conversations around queerness. Bi people face prejudice not just from straight citizens, but from gay and lesbian people, too: bi men are often treated as gay but in denial; bi women face widespread sexual objectification; and all are portrayed as sexually rapacious or tourists who don’t belong anywhere.

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Young people deprived of prosperity may represent the first generation that doesn’t grow more conservative with age

Spite. When you dig down to the essence of modern rightwing politics, you’re left with little else. This wasn’t always the case. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan offered clear, coherent visions of society, even if their worship of free markets delivered economic insecurity and stagnating living standards. While today’s Tories and Trumpified Republicans remain committed to defending privileged interests, their driving ambition now seems to be deliberately provoking fury among the progressively minded, much to the delight of their supporters. It’s this tendency that led Donald Trump to denounce Mexicans as criminals and attempt to ban Muslims from entering the US; it’s the same tendency that drove the home secretary, Suella Braverman, to declare that her “dream” and “obsession” was to see a flight transporting asylum seekers to Rwanda. Cruelty is precisely the point.

But this spite has found a particular target in younger British and American people, many of whom increasingly embrace progressive social values such as anti-racism and LGBTQ+ rights (granted, this relies on a generous definition of youth as millennials – while the oldest members of Generation Z are only in their mid-20s, the most senior millennials have now reached their early 40s). These generations have become a common enemy for the right. The feeling is mutual. According to new research and survey data, millennials are defying a supposed iron law of politics, that we shift to the right as we age. No other generation in recorded political history has retained such an entrenched rejection of rightwing politics as they’ve grown older.

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.