Clegg: Lies, then gets in trouble for telling the truth!

Clegg realises he has fucked up

More evidence, as if it was needed, that Nick Clegg is a giant walking sack of shit with a ministerial car: yesterday at Prime Minister’s questions he said the government was going to close Yarl’s Wood, a hellhole private prison for asylum seekers who have done nothing wrong.

But, a bit like when the Lib Dems promised in government that they would stop locking up kids, only to lock up and then deport a baby from Glasgow, it turns out this claim was about as true as the SDL claiming they’re not racist. The government’s real powers were quick to make sure everyone realised that in fact only the “family unit” (i.e. the bit where they lock up parents and their innocent kids) will be closed, but the centre as a whole will remain open. (Even on this minimal commitment – please note it hasn’t actually happened yet!)

Yarl’s Wood is a place where our society locks up people who have fled torture, rape and other horrors from around the world. Very often, their suffering in other places is the result of our government’s policies. When they get here, they are denied the right to live in relative safety in the UK, stuck in a private prison run for profit by 21st century evil megacorp SERCO, and eventually deported back to countries where they face extreme danger.

Earlier this year, innocent women locked up in Yarl’s Wood went on hunger strike to protest their incarceration, and the abusive, racist treatment they faced from SERCO’s staff.

Anyone with even an ounce of humanity or decency in their body who got into power would tear the prison walls down right away. Nick Clegg and his ConDem chums have proven that they’d like people to think they’re decent human beings, but in fact they’re duplicitous wankstains more interested in implementing an extreme-right economic programme than basic human rights.

Britain's shame: Yarl's Wood

You’d think this blatant porkie would have got Clegg in a spot of bother, but instead of being angry at him for lying from the dispatch box, all the media and political commentators are going mental about a point earlier on in the day when he actually told the truth!

In the posh boys debating style that Westminster is famous for, he was clashing with Jack Straw, and said, perhaps without thinking it through, that, “We may have to wait for his memoirs, but perhaps one day he will account for his role in the most disastrous decision of all: the illegal invasion of Iraq.”

This presents his Tory chums with a bit of a problem: they voted for the Iraq war back in 2003, and absolutely backed the idea that it was legal.

For once however, Clegg was telling the truth on this one. Under international law, the UK and US had no authorisation to send their troops into Iraq, and the rest of the world had to sit back and accept it because they didn’t know what else to do about George W. ‘Monkey with a razorblade’ Bush. In Britain, the then Labour government tried to pretend it was legal because they got the attorney general to “change his mind” and say everything was kosher in time for the invasion.

Now, the fact that the Deputy Prime Minister has said what we all know, that the war was illegal, from the government dispatch box, might give some more leverage to people who want to take the UK to court for war crimes and flouting of international law in invading Iraq.

Nothing to worry about lads, it's all legal and above board

To try and clean up the mess, the same beleagured government spokespeople were forced to insist that the deputy PM was speaking in a personal capacity (at Prime Minister’s questions! It doesn’t get much more official than that!), and that his views were not those of the government.

Nick Clegg is obviously a bit of an idiot if he thought that this would have no implications when he said it. But the sad thing is it’s obscured what is a big issue: privatised prisons which we use to lock up innocent people. The fact of the matter is, I don’t really care about the legality of the Iraq war. If the government at the time had managed to get a legal fig leaf for what they were doing it would still have been wrong, and no amount of debating after the fact will change that. What is happening right now though is that we have a piece of human garbage as deputy PM who keeps claiming he’s going to stop locking up kids and innocent people but never actually seems to make good on it.