Ten years ago, Edward Snowden warned us about state spying. Spare a thought for him, and worry about the future | Alan Rusbridger

The abuses the Guardian helped him bring to worldwide attention go on: the authorities have merely made it harder to expose them

  • Alan Rusbridger was editor of the Guardian from 1995-2015

Even amid the cacophony of social media, most journalism is met with a shrug or a murmur. But ​one story the Guardian published 10 years ago today exploded with the force of an earthquake.

The article revealed that the US National Security Agency (NSA) was collecting the phone records of millions of Verizon customers. In case anyone doubted the veracity of the claims, we were able to publish the top secret court order handed down by the foreign intelligence surveillance court (Fisa), which granted the US government the right to hold and scrutinise the metadata of millions of phone calls by American citizens.

Alan Rusbridger was editor of the Guardian from 1995-2015. He now edits Prospect Magazine.

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So this is British justice: Boris Johnson gets legal aid and a mother of three on the breadline doesn’t | 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.

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A campaign against inheritance tax led by a multimillionaire? These really are desperate times for the Tories | Polly Toynbee

While ministers look to the Telegraph for policies and Nadhim Zahawi fights for the status quo, Labour has a bold, serious vision

Governing parties in their death throes thrash about, gasping for life rafts and hunting through old lists to recapture the tried-and-tested vote-winners of yesteryear. The campaign by more than 50 Tory MPs and the Telegraph to abolish inheritance tax is a prime example. Didn’t it work its magic once before, when George Osborne spooked Gordon Brown out of calling an election in 2007 by promising a £1m threshold? Surely, therefore, it will work again in the Conservatives’ hour of desperate need?

This time, Labour is not spooked. Far from it. Nothing could be more comic than the multimillionaire Nadhim Zahawi leading this campaign, the man whose only memorable moment in his brief chancellorship was being sacked for failing to declare an ongoing investigation into his personal tax affairs. A party of zillionaires campaigning against a tax that only the likes of them need to pay looks like clueless insouciance. It shows how far their feet have drifted from terra firma. Yet again, their trusty Telegraph has led them madly astray – as it always does.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

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