It's a long time since I could raise enough energy or interest to face writing this blog. Apparently, an overwhelming interest in politicians ands their antics can do that to you.
Overwhelm you, that is.
The political landscape of Great Britain has changed in the intervening months. Labour has been replaced by a curious hybrid called ConLibDem. Much like the changing of the guard, although the personnel may differ, the replacements seem to be wearing exactly the same uniforms and performing precisely the same drills.
David Cameron, once if not Eurosceptic at least Eurowary, has obviously been guided into the same inner sanctum where his immediate immediate predecessors were first made to see the Euro light. Like them, he is already making lots of noise about "fighting" to protect British interests while appending his signature to any and all documents placed before him with little apparent resistance. Thus, he flies into Brussels on the wings of a stern pledge to hold the EU to zero increase in its bloated budgets. Then pronounces a great victory in restricting them to a mere 2.9%. Thanks Dave. It will certainly help stave off national bankruptcy, having to donate a few extra billion or so a year to the Eurocoffers.
Next, despite the fact that he has been in power for such a short period he has barely had time to learn the names of his LibDem cabinet colleagues, he has managed to strike up such a cosy relationship with Sarkozy that, very chummily, we have agreed to share one of our yet-to-be-built aircraft carriers with them. Oh yes, and also agreed that a French dockyard can have the contract for maintaining them once they are built and in service.
Not that this arrangement in any way furthers the plans for a joint Euro Army/Navy/Air Force at all. Oh No, this is just a couple of long term allies simply deciding to share assets, much as we did at Agincourt, Crecy and Waterloo. Justin a slightly different way.
Amazing what can be organized via a couple of friendly texts, isn't it?
Promises to protect Civil and individual liberties have gone much the same way. Theresa May has, with little pomp and absolutely no consultation either in Parliament or with the public, committed us even further to the reality of a Pan-European police force and Judiciary, reinforcing the reach and scope of foreign governments to track down and arrest British citizens without the intervention of the British courts. All we need to hear from Saint Theresa now is Labour's favourite old saw. You know the one: it goes something like: If you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear.
Across the water, the Irish tragedy is unfolding. It is truly ironic that a country that fought tooth and nail for independence from the British Empire looks as if it is about to meekly surrender and allow itself to be sucked into the ever-widening maw of the new, Greater German Empire. If you hear a lot of thunder over the next week or so, it will be the sound of the old Teutonic gods of war laughing themselves silly. All the years, all the men killed and blood shed by successive Reichs to bring first Europe and then the world under German domination and now matronly Angele Merkel is achieving that very objective without a shot being fired in anger. Greece was first. Now it's Ireland's turn. Next it will be Portugal, Spain and Italy. And, if little George Osborne continues to put our money into the pot for each bail-out, despite the fact that we are not part of the Euro Zone, then it will, inevitably, be the turn of what was once Great Britain.
It's good to be back.
Monday, 22 November 2010
Wednesday, 31 March 2010
It's a free country - part 2
Shawn Holes is an American who, like a lot of Americans , happens to be a practising Christian. In his case it is a particularly muscular brand of Christianity that he practises, involving street preaching and proselytising.
Unfortunately, nobody told Shawn that, in today's United Kingdom, such activities can get you into an awful lot of trouble.
Around two weeks ago, Shawn was in Glasgow with a group of fellow evangelists when he was arrested under one of the plethora of hate laws introduced since 1997. His crime? He was preaching to a crowd in a Glasgow street and quoted from St Luke's Gospel to answer a query about the biblical attitude to homosexuality. This is how he describes what happened:
Unfortunately, nobody told Shawn that, in today's United Kingdom, such activities can get you into an awful lot of trouble.
Around two weeks ago, Shawn was in Glasgow with a group of fellow evangelists when he was arrested under one of the plethora of hate laws introduced since 1997. His crime? He was preaching to a crowd in a Glasgow street and quoted from St Luke's Gospel to answer a query about the biblical attitude to homosexuality. This is how he describes what happened:
"On March 18Th I was arrested while preaching the
Gospel in downtown Glasgow Scotland. I spent a horrible night in jail and
all I can say is that it was just miserable. Too many details from this
specific incident occurred for me to list here. I will say however that
what it came down to was that two people were supposedly offended when I said
that homosexuality is a sin against Jesus, therefore the arrest. I was given two options:
1- plead guilty to some really trumped up charges and
possibly pay a small fine of hopefully only 50 pounds or so and go home by
Monday as planned or
2- plead not guilty and have to spend up to 8 weeks
waiting for the trial NOT being allowed to leave the country with no guarentee (sic)
of winning the case.
I chose option number one. Big bummer though. The
fine was 1000 pounds. Thats (sic)1600 US dollars."As far as the police were concerned, Shawn's mistake was in asserting that homosexuality is a sin. They were wrong. Shawn's real mistake was in assuming that, because freedom of expression had been central to our existence for at least the last couple of centuries, that this still held good today. Whatever the cause of this misapprehension, it cost both him and us dear. Shawn is financially and spiritually out of pocket. But, we have taken another significant step along the road to moral bankruptcy.
The bunch of fascistic pygmies who currently hold sway over us has made it its business to silence anyone who regards homosexuality as anything other than a completely natural state of being. Actually, what they have done and continue to do, thanks to Harriet Harman's upcoming equality bill, is create a whole raft of lifestyles and belief systems that are protected from comment or opinion, or at least any comment or opinion that does not conform to their narrow world view. They are unable - or unwilling - to understand that suppressing and criminalising opinions is more discriminatory and prejudicial than anything that Shawn and his ilk could ever do or say.
The professional atheist, Richard Dawkins, has a whole website dedicated to promulgating his beliefs. Every day he mocks anyone who believes in God, whatever form that God or belief might take. He does the same in print, on the radio and television and in public and invites his readers and listeners to share his dislike. In its own way, Dawkin's atheism has much in common with the religious fervour of the more extreme religious proselytisers.
As far as I know, he has yet to be arrested for preaching hatred. Which is as it should be. Every opinion is valid and every belief system has some merit, for the simple reason that there is always someone capable of testing or disputing their veracity. 20 years ago, had anyone proposed a law under which a completely innocent, law-abiding visitor to the UK could be threatened with gaol simply for expressing an opinion they would, rightly, have been laughed out of court by the liberal establishment.
Orchestrating the laughter would have been the likes of Jack Straw, Gordon Brown, Tony and Cherie Blair and Harriet Harman - the same bunch of chancers that has done so much to undermine our democracy and create a country completely alien to people raised on the ideal of a free society.
Friday, 26 March 2010
The great turkey vote
Conservatives are puzzled, and with good reason. For the last few years, polls have shown their share of the vote climbing to and staying steady at around 40% - enough to guarantee them victory and a decent majority in any General Election.
Given the litany of disasters that have assailed Labour for the last two years, they should be in a position where they would be pushed to get an offer of coalition from the Raving Loony Party, let alone the LibDems.
And yet, weirdly and almost inexplicably, Brown and his cohorts are not dead and buried. The most recent polls put the two main parties neck and neck. With Labour suffering from so many self-inflicted wounds why have the Tories consistently failed to finish them off?
Perhaps the answer lies in the latest employment statistics .
According to the Office for National Statistics, employment rose in the final quarter of 2009. Hosanna, Good News shout the pundits. Well, perhaps. The problem is that the 7000 new jobs created were all in the Public Sector. The picture was somewhat different in the Private Sector, where 61,000unfortunates were thrown out of work.
Consequently, as of the beginning of this year, although the total number of people in work was 28.86 million, almost a quarter of them, 6.1 million people, work for government in one form or another.
So, let's imagine a scenario in which someone whose salary is around 7% higher than the private sector equivalent, with a final salary pension inflation-proofed and guaranteed by the Government, is considering his options at the forthcoming General Election. On the one hand, he has Messrs Darling and Brown saying that to make wholesale cuts to public services would stall the recovery, feeble as it is, so their approach will be gently, gently. On the other, he has George Osborne promising to take an axe to public expenditure and, by definition, public jobs at the first available opportunity. All other things being equal, which of these is likely to represent the most attractive proposition to the ou Public Sector worker?
Now, from the gainfully employed, let's turn to the gainfully unemployed; in other words the multitude of those of working age who are, in official terminology, Inactive. There are 8.16 million of them, to be precise. Of that number, 2.31 million are students who are not in the labour market. 2.5 million are officially unemployed and drawing benefits of some kind. Many of these are desperately unhappy to be in that predicament and will do almost anything to get back to paid work of some kind or another.
But, unfortunately, a large number are not. There are whole areas of the UK where lack of a job is a fact of life, where several generations subsist entirely on benefits. In these areas, some of the shrewder ones realised long ago that it is more rewarding to be officially incapable of work through disability than to bother with unemployment and job seekers' allowance. There are nearly 3 millions claiming Disability benefit. Of that number, a surprising proportion, as many as 1/2 million apparently, are under the age of 25.
Given that this group will be a target for some serious pruning, it is difficult to see any incentive for them to vote Conservative at the next election.
The UK allows any EU citizen who is permanently resident here to vote in ALL elections. By contrast, a UK citizen resident in Ireland is allowed to vote in local and European elections there but not at a General election or in any national referenda. The same is true of most other EU countries.
That means that Poles and other newly-minted EU citizens from eastern Europe who have settled here in the last three to four years are all entitled to vote in the coming General Election. This new constituency of potential Labour voters was one of the planned benefits of Labour's drive for multiculturalism when it came to office. As we are all now well aware, the assumption was that these newcomers would not only be grateful to their Labour hosts but register their gratitude in the most practical way possible, by endorsing the Party at the General Election. Suitably galvanised, this group could easily swell the Labour vote by several hundred thousand come the day
Do not be surprised to see a concerted government campaign to persuade these newcomers to exercise their newly-acquired right to vote over the coming six to eight weeks; purely in the interests of Democracy, of course.
Take all of these groups together and what you get is a significant proportion of the population for whom the current administration is the principal source of income. Asking them to elect the Tories is akin to expecting turkeys to vote for Christmas.
Given the litany of disasters that have assailed Labour for the last two years, they should be in a position where they would be pushed to get an offer of coalition from the Raving Loony Party, let alone the LibDems.
And yet, weirdly and almost inexplicably, Brown and his cohorts are not dead and buried. The most recent polls put the two main parties neck and neck. With Labour suffering from so many self-inflicted wounds why have the Tories consistently failed to finish them off?
Perhaps the answer lies in the latest employment statistics .
According to the Office for National Statistics, employment rose in the final quarter of 2009. Hosanna, Good News shout the pundits. Well, perhaps. The problem is that the 7000 new jobs created were all in the Public Sector. The picture was somewhat different in the Private Sector, where 61,000unfortunates were thrown out of work.
Consequently, as of the beginning of this year, although the total number of people in work was 28.86 million, almost a quarter of them, 6.1 million people, work for government in one form or another.
So, let's imagine a scenario in which someone whose salary is around 7% higher than the private sector equivalent, with a final salary pension inflation-proofed and guaranteed by the Government, is considering his options at the forthcoming General Election. On the one hand, he has Messrs Darling and Brown saying that to make wholesale cuts to public services would stall the recovery, feeble as it is, so their approach will be gently, gently. On the other, he has George Osborne promising to take an axe to public expenditure and, by definition, public jobs at the first available opportunity. All other things being equal, which of these is likely to represent the most attractive proposition to the ou Public Sector worker?
Now, from the gainfully employed, let's turn to the gainfully unemployed; in other words the multitude of those of working age who are, in official terminology, Inactive. There are 8.16 million of them, to be precise. Of that number, 2.31 million are students who are not in the labour market. 2.5 million are officially unemployed and drawing benefits of some kind. Many of these are desperately unhappy to be in that predicament and will do almost anything to get back to paid work of some kind or another.
But, unfortunately, a large number are not. There are whole areas of the UK where lack of a job is a fact of life, where several generations subsist entirely on benefits. In these areas, some of the shrewder ones realised long ago that it is more rewarding to be officially incapable of work through disability than to bother with unemployment and job seekers' allowance. There are nearly 3 millions claiming Disability benefit. Of that number, a surprising proportion, as many as 1/2 million apparently, are under the age of 25.
Given that this group will be a target for some serious pruning, it is difficult to see any incentive for them to vote Conservative at the next election.
The UK allows any EU citizen who is permanently resident here to vote in ALL elections. By contrast, a UK citizen resident in Ireland is allowed to vote in local and European elections there but not at a General election or in any national referenda. The same is true of most other EU countries.
That means that Poles and other newly-minted EU citizens from eastern Europe who have settled here in the last three to four years are all entitled to vote in the coming General Election. This new constituency of potential Labour voters was one of the planned benefits of Labour's drive for multiculturalism when it came to office. As we are all now well aware, the assumption was that these newcomers would not only be grateful to their Labour hosts but register their gratitude in the most practical way possible, by endorsing the Party at the General Election. Suitably galvanised, this group could easily swell the Labour vote by several hundred thousand come the day
Do not be surprised to see a concerted government campaign to persuade these newcomers to exercise their newly-acquired right to vote over the coming six to eight weeks; purely in the interests of Democracy, of course.
Take all of these groups together and what you get is a significant proportion of the population for whom the current administration is the principal source of income. Asking them to elect the Tories is akin to expecting turkeys to vote for Christmas.
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