Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

World

Op-Ed: UK Tories prove their insanity with jailing of journalists law

The new laws part of an act called the Espionage Bill echo the Trump administration’s hatred of free news sources. Seems conservatives around the world don’t just hate the truth, they don’t want anyone else to know about it, either.
Under this bill, you can get 14 years’ jail for communicating or obtaining leaked information. So if you find a document or memory stick in the street, and don’t know what it is, and mention it to someone, you’ve committed a crime.
Add to this the proposed legislation against the public interest defence used by journalists to defend their right to publish news. So the public right to know, even in theory, is being dismantled.
First, the absurdity
I’ll have to ask you to be patient with the list of absurdities:
1. These kind of things are already covered in great depth by the Official Secrets Act which this bill seeks to replace and security legislation. Why not amend it, instead of a whole new Act of Parliament?
2. Where do leaks come from? Government, mainly. Someone throws a tantrum about something they don’t like and leaks it. In this case, a third party, the reporter, goes to jail for it.
3. The intimidation approach won’t work anyway. Decades ago, when paper ruled, jailing someone who published a leak might have made sense. Now, when bots can publish anything globally in terabytes every second, it’s ridiculous.
4. Anyone with a bit of tech savvy could clean out any info they want from these moron so-called governments and sell it with no risk of being caught by the incompetent fools now running things. Most will make a point of humiliating the governments concerned. It’ll make Wikileaks look like a local bingo game.
5. Given the ludicrous, incompetent nature of most conservative government releases recently, “leaking” information about them is a bit redundant. It’s like publishing Chicken Little and nothing else. In the Days Of Incompetence, more babble from the people destroying their nations isn’t news. It’s corpse-gas. Anyway, how do you leak a Tweet?
Next, the insanity
At a time when Trump is disputing the validity of the vote that elected him, and his chimps can’t even get heads of government names right, it’s hard to imagine anything more insane. The UK, however, has gone further down the road to oblivion than the US. Leaving the EU without a plan, with nothing but a financial sector as a national asset, and calling it sovereignty is like calling getting thrown out a 10th floor window a chance to test the law of gravity. Actually, it’s the exact opposite of sovereignty; it means the UK is totally dependent on the finance sector.
Wall Street, the privileged pigsty of America, and London’s equally hygienic financial vermin, have been involved in maiming the world economically socially and physically. The conservative governments have done everything possible to pander to every whim of these useless peasant filth. Adding layer upon layer of law to try to hide the obvious is about as nuts as anyone needs to get.
Health, economics, housing, education, you name it; there’s nothing left to leak any more. The only leak available is “We’re getting rich on public money”. Everybody already knows. The details are simply more gossip from the parasites.
Lastly, the payback
Arguably more insane is the theory that there’ll be no future ramifications for these dear little maggots. Anyone who can’t see the rising hostility must be either totally delusional or incredibly optimistic. The miracle is that the bullets and explosives aren’t already raining down.
Nobody actually has to put up with this. The backlash, and prosecutions, will be epic. I’m just hoping that when it happens, the greatest sycophants and cowards in political history (that ain’t good) will get what they deserve, with no restraint.

Avatar photo
Written By

Editor-at-Large based in Sydney, Australia.

You may also like:

World

Calling for urgent action is the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)

Business

The cathedral is on track to reopen on December 8 - Copyright AFP Ludovic MARINParis’s Notre-Dame Cathedral, ravaged by fire in 2019, is on...

Business

Saudi Aramco President & CEO Amin Nasser speaks during the CERAWeek oil summit in Houston, Texas - Copyright AFP Mark FelixPointing to the still...

Business

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal infers that some workers might be falling out of the job market altogether.