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.
Monday, 4 May 2009
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.
Thursday, 26 February 2009
Unnatural selection
Around fifteen years ago, I was living in the US and working, among other things, as a freelance journalist. The Group of Newspapers that I worked for gave every new arrival a large tome that would have made War & Peace look like a pamphlet. It included the style guide, which covered practical matters like where and how to use apostrophes, the company's approach to freebies for journalists (Answer: accept any and you are toast) and its dos and don'ts regarding what could loosely be labelled relationships and discrimination.
Although I thought it unnecessary to spell everything out in such detail, at least it left everyone who worked for the paper in no doubt about its attitude to discrimination of any kind. Put briefly, one was not allowed to discriminate against any group or individual based on gender, sexual orientation, religion or race. I remember talking about it with friends and work colleagues whenever I was back in the UK - about twice or three times a year. Generally speaking the reaction was one of disbelief coupled with comments about bloody pc Yanks and a general sense of relief that we, the British, were far too sensible to need any such guidelines. Oh how easy it is to be smug: And wrong.
I look around the UK now and I doubt that there are many more politically correct countries in the world. Occasionally I read blog sites that make the same claim on behalf of Canada but, never having had to live there, I am happy to claim the PC Cup on our behalf.
Well, happy is probably not the word I am looking for; resigned, disillusioned and bloody furious would be closer to the mark. Because, as with all things in modern Britain, we have embraced political correctness with a degree of enthusiasm that I would never have thought possible twenty years ago.
Like most people I let the sheer irrelevance and pointlessness of most politically correct policies wash over me andwhile I try to get on, probably slightly more grimly, with my life. Recently, though, I have witnessed a prime example of what happens when political correctness becomes the key driver in a decision making process. My company - a global engineering firm- has recently decided, with no small degree of satisfaction, to identify a number of female managers from different parts of the global organisation that it will groom for future occupation of the most senior management positions. In fact, so proud of this initiative were they that they announced it on the company's global intranet. And were, somehow, taken aback by the ferocity of the reaction. A reaction, it has to be said, that was equally disillusioned from whichever side of the gender divide it came.
The stated purpose of this initiative was to redress a perceived imbalance in the number of women on the main board. Which was ironic in itself. You see, my company is Scandinavian, but its reach is genuinely global, with subsidiaries in almost 100 countries many of which have been around for almost 100 years. Despite this fact, the main board is composed almost exclusively of Scandinavians and is, apparently, closed to almost everyone whose name doesn't end in sson, irrespective of gender.
The point of this little anecdote is that "positive discrimination" is an oxymoron. It is impossible to discriminate positively in favour of one group without discriminating negatively against everyone else who isn't a member of that select group. The truth of this is so self-evident that it shouldn't need explanation or justification. Unfortunately, it's a measure of our PC times that, simply for saying so, one can be labelled mysoginistic and anti-female. It engenders the same kind of reaction - a mixture of pity and condescension - that one receives for expressing doubts about Global Warming.
Anyway, since promoting discrete groups seems to be the order of the day, I am currently lobbying for people of the Romany persuasion to be promoted to the main board. If that fails, I might be tempted to turn my lobbying skills to the benefit of left handed, ginger-headed Albanians.
Although I thought it unnecessary to spell everything out in such detail, at least it left everyone who worked for the paper in no doubt about its attitude to discrimination of any kind. Put briefly, one was not allowed to discriminate against any group or individual based on gender, sexual orientation, religion or race. I remember talking about it with friends and work colleagues whenever I was back in the UK - about twice or three times a year. Generally speaking the reaction was one of disbelief coupled with comments about bloody pc Yanks and a general sense of relief that we, the British, were far too sensible to need any such guidelines. Oh how easy it is to be smug: And wrong.
I look around the UK now and I doubt that there are many more politically correct countries in the world. Occasionally I read blog sites that make the same claim on behalf of Canada but, never having had to live there, I am happy to claim the PC Cup on our behalf.
Well, happy is probably not the word I am looking for; resigned, disillusioned and bloody furious would be closer to the mark. Because, as with all things in modern Britain, we have embraced political correctness with a degree of enthusiasm that I would never have thought possible twenty years ago.
Like most people I let the sheer irrelevance and pointlessness of most politically correct policies wash over me andwhile I try to get on, probably slightly more grimly, with my life. Recently, though, I have witnessed a prime example of what happens when political correctness becomes the key driver in a decision making process. My company - a global engineering firm- has recently decided, with no small degree of satisfaction, to identify a number of female managers from different parts of the global organisation that it will groom for future occupation of the most senior management positions. In fact, so proud of this initiative were they that they announced it on the company's global intranet. And were, somehow, taken aback by the ferocity of the reaction. A reaction, it has to be said, that was equally disillusioned from whichever side of the gender divide it came.
The stated purpose of this initiative was to redress a perceived imbalance in the number of women on the main board. Which was ironic in itself. You see, my company is Scandinavian, but its reach is genuinely global, with subsidiaries in almost 100 countries many of which have been around for almost 100 years. Despite this fact, the main board is composed almost exclusively of Scandinavians and is, apparently, closed to almost everyone whose name doesn't end in sson, irrespective of gender.
The point of this little anecdote is that "positive discrimination" is an oxymoron. It is impossible to discriminate positively in favour of one group without discriminating negatively against everyone else who isn't a member of that select group. The truth of this is so self-evident that it shouldn't need explanation or justification. Unfortunately, it's a measure of our PC times that, simply for saying so, one can be labelled mysoginistic and anti-female. It engenders the same kind of reaction - a mixture of pity and condescension - that one receives for expressing doubts about Global Warming.
Anyway, since promoting discrete groups seems to be the order of the day, I am currently lobbying for people of the Romany persuasion to be promoted to the main board. If that fails, I might be tempted to turn my lobbying skills to the benefit of left handed, ginger-headed Albanians.
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