“I know this isn’t enough and people are angry and it will take time. My single most important thing in my life is my relationship with my constituents in Salford.” Of course it is, Miss Blears: especially when they are likely to take the first available opportunity to end the relationship; probably about this time next year when Gordon finally calls an election.
Suddenly, if the stream of contrite apologies spewing out of Westminster is anything to go by, the penny has, finally, dropped. MPs of all parties now seem to understand that the British electorate is absolutely appalled at the whole expenses scam. They will no longer be fobbed off with references to rules and entitlements. They will no longer shrug at the idea that someone living in a relative's bedroom actually, honestly, believes it to be her main residence. Tory grandees who use the system to pay gardeners and other domestic staff will now attract odium instead of indifference.
And, despite the best efforts of his sister-in-law, Gordon Brown is still going to find it difficult to explain not why he paid someone to clean his London flat, but why he needed a London flat as a second home at all when he has spent the last 12 years lording it up in Numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street at the taxpayer's expense.
The other Mrs Brown was just one of a number of extras wheeled out over the weekend to try to lighten the atmosphere surrounding the expenses scandal. Another was ex-MP Matthew Parrish whose brief was to introduce a little levity into the proceedings. This he tried - and failed - to do by making the whole thing sound like a, slightly farcical, storm in a tea-cup, with frequent references to claims for bath plugs and other inconsequential household items ; as if ramping the system to defraud taxpayers of thousands of pounds was no different to padding a claim for car mileage in the private sector. Compounding his obvious ignorance of how the private sector works, Mr Parrish then compared the relatively low pay - his words - that MPs had to endure with the fantastic salaries they would undoubtedly attract if they worked in the Private Sector; as if the City and the private sector were two interchangeable terms.
MPs earn a basic salary of £68,000 without allowances. Compared with the six and seven figure earnings of the average Investment banker, that doesn't sound like a great deal of very much at all. But, it is three times the average wage. And, take it from me, it is a great deal more than many middle managers in the productive sector of the economy enjoy. More to the point, very few of the mediocrities who populate Westminster would actually hold down a job in private industry. That is why they are all so keen to climb the political greasy pole. Because the contacts and experience they accrue during their time in power are about the only marketable attributes they have once they get tossed out of office.
The reason that this and other attempts to downplay the scandal failed was that the Telegraph released details of Tory piggery to set beside the earlier revelations of Labour snouts in the trough. At a stroke, strident Labour claims of political bias were shown to be groundless. More to the point, the latest revelations demonstrated the depth of the corruption inside our political system. It became obvious to every one but Speaker Martin -apparently- that no one was going be able to puncture this particular balloon.
If anything, the more strident the denials become, the more hot air is spouted, the larger the balloon grows. Personally, I believe that at least one major politician might receive a visit from the police in the not too distant future. My nomination is Jacqui Smith although I would be equally happy to see Darling, Michael Gove or Michael Ancram having their collar felt. We live in interesting times.
Tuesday, 12 May 2009
Monday, 4 May 2009
What a bloody liberty!
It's akin to Ken Livingstone embracing capitalism; Jamie Oliver Oliver endorsing Turkey Twizzlers; or any member of the Christian Right in America throwing in his lot with Obama.
Today the greatest enemy of personal liberty and freedom this country has had to endure since Oilver Cromwell has had the brazen, long-necked cheek to write a hymn to Britishness.
Gordon ( I'm in charge) Brown - for it is he - has once again set out to prove either that he is a charlatan; or that he is completely bonkers; or, possibly, a large dollop of both. Writing in today's Daily Mail, the man who has either directly encouraged or, at the very least, has failed to prevent, the enactment of the most restrictive Laws in recent British history has had the nerve to list the love of personal liberty as one of the defining British traits.
This, let us remind ourselves, is a man who has been at the very heart of the Labour administration for 13 years; the man, let us not forget, who was desperate for us to appreciate just how much power and influence he wielded when he was Chancellor. Nothing, apparently, got done or even considered until Gordon Brown had evaluated it, approved it and, most importantly since he held the purse strings in his great clunking fist, agreed to stump up the readies to fund it.
Thus, we can be sure that he endorsed, and still endorses, legislation that will require every freedom loving British citizen to carry an ID Card; that forces the same sons and daughters of liberty to present a passport or other photo I.D even when travelling internally by plane in the UK, that threatens them with arrest or the confiscation of their camera if they take photographs that the police might object to ( such as coppers battering demonstrators or shooting innocent Brazilian electricians) ; that treats mildly eccentric trainspotters as potential terrorists; that instructs the police to arrest innocent Christians for expressing sincerely-held, but negative, opinions about homosexuality; that removes their right (or liberty) to express beliefs, however soberly held, about other faith or belief systems; that seeks to convince us that the only way for the government to protect our hard-won liberties is to allow them at both national and local level to spy on our e-mails, on-line searches and other electronic communications; that uses Parliamentary democracy to turn one significant group of people in our society - smokers -into pariahs and sub-humans who are not allowed to enjoy the same social interaction as the rest of us in pubs, bars and restaurants.
All of these things are Gordon's legacy to us; the sum of 13 years of his management of the country. He has helped to create a police state whose intrusion and control of people's lives goes way beyond anything that George Orwell ever envisaged in 1984. With the willing assistance of the brain-dead ( Jacqui Smith), the infantile ( Harman, Milliband, Balls) and the manipulative in the shape of Mandelson, Blair and Campbell, he has attacked and all but destroyed the very British characteristics - tolerance, fair play, justice and Liberty- that he claims are so central to his being in today's Daily Mail.
And, with the hugely divisive and class-based equality legislation that Lady Longford ( AKA Harriet Harman) is introducing, the last bastions of personal liberty - including the freedom to choose work mates, business colleagues, councillors and other officials soley on their qualifications and ability to do a particular job - will be consigned to the dustbin along with freedom of speech and expression.
Brown promised an end to boom and bust. What we ended up with is the biggest bust in British hsitory. Brown, typically, says none of it is his fault. It's a global problem.
Now, he wants the British people to buy into his new-found sense of Britishness, while doing everything in his power to destroy it. When people finally wake up to what is happening; when it becomes clear that the people principally affected by anti-terorist legislation are not foreign insurgents but their own friends, family and neighbours, Brown will place the blame on everything - and everyone- but himself.
He has already seeded the ground in his Mail article, referring to " security threats that would have been unimaginable 50 years ago."
Let's see. Fifty years takes us back to 1959. True the UK didn't face the threat of Moslem terrorism that it does now. But, that's not to say that there were no threats. In no particular order, I can think of Greek Cypriot EOKA terrorists, the Mau Mau in Kenya; insurgents in Malaysia and Aden. Later, from 1969 onwards, we saw the rise of the IRA, the Provisional IRA and other splinter groups all of whom regularly inflicted , or tried to inflict, terror on the British people. I am old enough to remember the bomb attacks on the Horse Guards, the Old Bailey, the Tory's Brighton hotel and the Guildford squaddies' pub; all of which were carried out by men who looked, talked and, more or less, shared the same cultural background as the bulk of the population. In that sense, they represented a much more difficult threat to counter than that posed by Moslem extremists who come from a large, but clearly dentifiable minority, of the population.
None of the measures introduced to curb the IRA campaigns - which I objected to along with many other people - were so loosely drafted as to enable local councils and other organisations to use them against innocent members of the general public. Now, we are cursed with an administration that is apparently incapable of drafting legislation of equivalent unambivalence. Instead, modern terrorism laws are so open to mis-interpretation that they have been used to spy on parents accused of placing their kids in the wrong schools, and to eject an octogenarian acivist - who had the temerity to embarass Jack Straw - from the Labour Conference.
Some might say this bad draftsmanship is inadvertent or simple incompetence. I beg to differ. This is an administration stuffed to the gills with lawyers. If the legislation allows them and their appointees to harass, observe and control the population at large then I believe it to be by design, not accident.
Whatever Gordon might write, now or in the future, about his love of liberty, all the evidence points in the opposite direction. He is an enemy of freedom and personal liberty and a real threat to democracy in this country.
Today the greatest enemy of personal liberty and freedom this country has had to endure since Oilver Cromwell has had the brazen, long-necked cheek to write a hymn to Britishness.
Gordon ( I'm in charge) Brown - for it is he - has once again set out to prove either that he is a charlatan; or that he is completely bonkers; or, possibly, a large dollop of both. Writing in today's Daily Mail, the man who has either directly encouraged or, at the very least, has failed to prevent, the enactment of the most restrictive Laws in recent British history has had the nerve to list the love of personal liberty as one of the defining British traits.
This, let us remind ourselves, is a man who has been at the very heart of the Labour administration for 13 years; the man, let us not forget, who was desperate for us to appreciate just how much power and influence he wielded when he was Chancellor. Nothing, apparently, got done or even considered until Gordon Brown had evaluated it, approved it and, most importantly since he held the purse strings in his great clunking fist, agreed to stump up the readies to fund it.
Thus, we can be sure that he endorsed, and still endorses, legislation that will require every freedom loving British citizen to carry an ID Card; that forces the same sons and daughters of liberty to present a passport or other photo I.D even when travelling internally by plane in the UK, that threatens them with arrest or the confiscation of their camera if they take photographs that the police might object to ( such as coppers battering demonstrators or shooting innocent Brazilian electricians) ; that treats mildly eccentric trainspotters as potential terrorists; that instructs the police to arrest innocent Christians for expressing sincerely-held, but negative, opinions about homosexuality; that removes their right (or liberty) to express beliefs, however soberly held, about other faith or belief systems; that seeks to convince us that the only way for the government to protect our hard-won liberties is to allow them at both national and local level to spy on our e-mails, on-line searches and other electronic communications; that uses Parliamentary democracy to turn one significant group of people in our society - smokers -into pariahs and sub-humans who are not allowed to enjoy the same social interaction as the rest of us in pubs, bars and restaurants.
All of these things are Gordon's legacy to us; the sum of 13 years of his management of the country. He has helped to create a police state whose intrusion and control of people's lives goes way beyond anything that George Orwell ever envisaged in 1984. With the willing assistance of the brain-dead ( Jacqui Smith), the infantile ( Harman, Milliband, Balls) and the manipulative in the shape of Mandelson, Blair and Campbell, he has attacked and all but destroyed the very British characteristics - tolerance, fair play, justice and Liberty- that he claims are so central to his being in today's Daily Mail.
And, with the hugely divisive and class-based equality legislation that Lady Longford ( AKA Harriet Harman) is introducing, the last bastions of personal liberty - including the freedom to choose work mates, business colleagues, councillors and other officials soley on their qualifications and ability to do a particular job - will be consigned to the dustbin along with freedom of speech and expression.
Brown promised an end to boom and bust. What we ended up with is the biggest bust in British hsitory. Brown, typically, says none of it is his fault. It's a global problem.
Now, he wants the British people to buy into his new-found sense of Britishness, while doing everything in his power to destroy it. When people finally wake up to what is happening; when it becomes clear that the people principally affected by anti-terorist legislation are not foreign insurgents but their own friends, family and neighbours, Brown will place the blame on everything - and everyone- but himself.
He has already seeded the ground in his Mail article, referring to " security threats that would have been unimaginable 50 years ago."
Let's see. Fifty years takes us back to 1959. True the UK didn't face the threat of Moslem terrorism that it does now. But, that's not to say that there were no threats. In no particular order, I can think of Greek Cypriot EOKA terrorists, the Mau Mau in Kenya; insurgents in Malaysia and Aden. Later, from 1969 onwards, we saw the rise of the IRA, the Provisional IRA and other splinter groups all of whom regularly inflicted , or tried to inflict, terror on the British people. I am old enough to remember the bomb attacks on the Horse Guards, the Old Bailey, the Tory's Brighton hotel and the Guildford squaddies' pub; all of which were carried out by men who looked, talked and, more or less, shared the same cultural background as the bulk of the population. In that sense, they represented a much more difficult threat to counter than that posed by Moslem extremists who come from a large, but clearly dentifiable minority, of the population.
None of the measures introduced to curb the IRA campaigns - which I objected to along with many other people - were so loosely drafted as to enable local councils and other organisations to use them against innocent members of the general public. Now, we are cursed with an administration that is apparently incapable of drafting legislation of equivalent unambivalence. Instead, modern terrorism laws are so open to mis-interpretation that they have been used to spy on parents accused of placing their kids in the wrong schools, and to eject an octogenarian acivist - who had the temerity to embarass Jack Straw - from the Labour Conference.
Some might say this bad draftsmanship is inadvertent or simple incompetence. I beg to differ. This is an administration stuffed to the gills with lawyers. If the legislation allows them and their appointees to harass, observe and control the population at large then I believe it to be by design, not accident.
Whatever Gordon might write, now or in the future, about his love of liberty, all the evidence points in the opposite direction. He is an enemy of freedom and personal liberty and a real threat to democracy in this country.
Monday, 6 April 2009
Firepersons urged to hide light under a bushel
If your house were on fire, how worried do you think you would be about the gender, faith, sexual orientation or hair colour of the person doing their best to put it out?
If you needed to be carried, dragged or otherwise physically removed from a burning building, how desperate would you be to know the extent and intensity of the diversity training the person saving your life had enjoyed in the previous 12 months?
These are not rhetorical questions. They actually need to be addressed and answered.
If the Lincolnshire Fire Service is to be believed, the thorny problems that firefighters have to confront are to do with gender and faith; not the physical strength or mental ability needed to save life, limb and home.
So, they have splurged precious time and money designing a range of clothing which does not, apparently, compromise Moslem restrictions on dress and public modesty in order to attract more female members of that faith into the fire service.
Take a long moment to consider the sheer lunacy of this proposition if you really want to appreciate the damage that the PC culture is doing to our society.
Like most Fire Services, Lincolnshire does not struggle to attract would be firefighters. In fact, they have candidates queuing up for the job. The big problem is that they're the wrong type of candidate; white, male and, like most of the population, either irreligious or CofE. All of which, from the standpoint of the Lincolnshire Fire Service, disqualifies them from applying. What they desire, above all, are female firefighters and, preferably, female firefighters of a Muslim persuasion. They have quotas to fill and Brownie points to earn. Hence the lady Muslim firefighter's uniform complete with all-enveloping skirt and blouse and a hoodie that shields the face and covers the hair.
Now, Lincolnshire is not the South of England and, although it attracts its fair share of immigrants, they tend to be agricultural workers drawn from Eastern Europe; Poles, Czechs, Estonians and the like. Not too many of a Muslim bent, in other words. So, no meaningful argument can be made for the need for more Muslims - male or female -to be recruited to achieve some bureaucratically contrived racial balance.
But, let's assume for the sake of argument that there were some Muslims who might be interested in firefighting as a career - and that some of them were female. Now, here is where the conundrums really start to roll.
If these women's beliefs were orthodox enough to welcome a westernised version of the burkah as a uniform, they would have husbands of an equally orthodox bent. And these men would be the last people on earth to allow their wives to take a job that involved direct, unchaperoned, contact with men every working day.
On the other hand, no self-respecting woman - Muslim or otherwise - would seriously entertain the notion of doing the tough, physically demanding job of a fire fighter wrapped up like an Egyptian mummy. Like their counterparts in the Police and the Armed Forces, they would want to wear clothes that were practical, comfortable and suited to the rigours of the role. That takes our mock-burkah out of the equation straight away.
What this sorry tale tells us is that the Lincolnshire Fire Service, like so many of our traditional services, has been infiltrated and taken over by the PC tendency. It's main purpose is no longer to provide protection for life and property but a career path for social engineers whose only goal is self-advancement and aggrandisement. The day is not that far off when people's lives are lost because some PC idiot prevents firefighters actually confronting a fire until it has burned itself out because of Health & Safety issues. Don't bet against it being someone from the Lincolnshire Service who issues that command.
If you needed to be carried, dragged or otherwise physically removed from a burning building, how desperate would you be to know the extent and intensity of the diversity training the person saving your life had enjoyed in the previous 12 months?
These are not rhetorical questions. They actually need to be addressed and answered.
If the Lincolnshire Fire Service is to be believed, the thorny problems that firefighters have to confront are to do with gender and faith; not the physical strength or mental ability needed to save life, limb and home.
So, they have splurged precious time and money designing a range of clothing which does not, apparently, compromise Moslem restrictions on dress and public modesty in order to attract more female members of that faith into the fire service.
Take a long moment to consider the sheer lunacy of this proposition if you really want to appreciate the damage that the PC culture is doing to our society.
Like most Fire Services, Lincolnshire does not struggle to attract would be firefighters. In fact, they have candidates queuing up for the job. The big problem is that they're the wrong type of candidate; white, male and, like most of the population, either irreligious or CofE. All of which, from the standpoint of the Lincolnshire Fire Service, disqualifies them from applying. What they desire, above all, are female firefighters and, preferably, female firefighters of a Muslim persuasion. They have quotas to fill and Brownie points to earn. Hence the lady Muslim firefighter's uniform complete with all-enveloping skirt and blouse and a hoodie that shields the face and covers the hair.
Now, Lincolnshire is not the South of England and, although it attracts its fair share of immigrants, they tend to be agricultural workers drawn from Eastern Europe; Poles, Czechs, Estonians and the like. Not too many of a Muslim bent, in other words. So, no meaningful argument can be made for the need for more Muslims - male or female -to be recruited to achieve some bureaucratically contrived racial balance.
But, let's assume for the sake of argument that there were some Muslims who might be interested in firefighting as a career - and that some of them were female. Now, here is where the conundrums really start to roll.
If these women's beliefs were orthodox enough to welcome a westernised version of the burkah as a uniform, they would have husbands of an equally orthodox bent. And these men would be the last people on earth to allow their wives to take a job that involved direct, unchaperoned, contact with men every working day.
On the other hand, no self-respecting woman - Muslim or otherwise - would seriously entertain the notion of doing the tough, physically demanding job of a fire fighter wrapped up like an Egyptian mummy. Like their counterparts in the Police and the Armed Forces, they would want to wear clothes that were practical, comfortable and suited to the rigours of the role. That takes our mock-burkah out of the equation straight away.
What this sorry tale tells us is that the Lincolnshire Fire Service, like so many of our traditional services, has been infiltrated and taken over by the PC tendency. It's main purpose is no longer to provide protection for life and property but a career path for social engineers whose only goal is self-advancement and aggrandisement. The day is not that far off when people's lives are lost because some PC idiot prevents firefighters actually confronting a fire until it has burned itself out because of Health & Safety issues. Don't bet against it being someone from the Lincolnshire Service who issues that command.
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