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Saturday 14 February 2015

UKIP Might Not Be Perfect, But It's A Start:

It might well be argued that today's British political landscape simply mirrors that of many other western European democracies, in that it is fundamentally broken and no longer truly represents the wishes, or indeed the best interests of the vast majority of its native population. We have seen it in France, in Spain and more recently in Greece, the emergence of both new and existing insurgency parties increasing their electoral influence in a direct response to the complete and utter failure of the more traditional parties to deliver on their promises of more prosperity, greater democracy and fuller accountability.
 
Whether it's the Tory or Labour parties in Britain, the Socialist's or the UMP in France, the People's Party or the Socialist Workers Party in Spain, New Democracy or PASOK in Greece, increasingly they are being successfully challenged by the likes of UKIP and the SNP in the UK, by the Front National in France, by Podemos in Spain, by the 5 Star Movement in Italy and now by the Syriza Party in Greece, which has recently been elected into office there. The Greek people it would seem have been the first to recognise that traditional old style politics, where voting for the same old faces, the same old failed ideological solutions can't and won't work for their country; and so they have opted to throw their old electoral habits away and elected to have some new ones brought in instead.
 
Now, it might well be argued that a common theme amongst these nations is the overarching and often unwelcome presence of the European Union, which although preaching mutual benefit and continental unity, is probably one of the most economically malign and socially divisive influences ever created within mainland Europe. However, to simply blame the EU for every economic disaster, every social breakdown, or indeed for every political miscalculation that has taken place in these various countries would be a grievous error, as that would suppose that traditional politicians in the UK, France, Spain, Greece and Italy have had little or nothing to do with the seemingly numerous and insurmountable problems that have affected their individual nations over the course of the past few years, when in fact, they have been entirely responsible for many of those same problems.
 
It is probably true to say that traditional, ideological and dogmatic political thinking on the part of mainstream politicians throughout the continent, in the UK, France, Spain, Greece and Italy, etc. is just as much to blame for the recent upsurge in widespread public dissatisfaction in those countries, as is the restrictive effects of the wholly unrepresentative and entirely questionable construct of the European Union itself. The fact that an unwieldy, wasteful, and largely unaccountable political, economic and social construct like the EU was first imagined, created and then operated, despite the torrent of good advice and indisputable evidence that was weighed against it, speaks volumes about the personal vanity, incompetence and the inflexibility of those who not only first proposed it, not just those who helped establish it, but also those who remain complicit in helping to continue the political, economic and social folly.
 
Apart from both being located on the European continent, just how are Germany and Greece alike? Exactly what do France and Poland have in common, or how are the Republic of Ireland and Portugal, or even Holland and Spain, in anyway similar to one another? The truth is, that aside from having willingly agreed to share their national sovereignty with one another, deferring many of their national competencies to a centralised parliament; and created a new common European currency that nearly all have chosen to use, most of the 28 member states of the EU have absolutely nothing in common with one another, apart that it, for a mainstream political elite who are bound and determined to forge ahead with the political experiment, even if it has to be over the heads of the 28 entirely separate and disparate native populations.
 
However, this blind determination to press ahead with the European Union, in the face of such widespread public opposition, anxiety and even anger amongst the native populations of continental Europe, isn't the responsibility of the EU itself, which is a wholly artificial political entity, but probably has more to do with each of those continental nations being governed by their own groups of generally unremarkable, uninspired, unimaginative and personally insipid politicians. After all, who in their right mind would ever call David Cameron an inspirational leader, or Francoise Hollande a visionary one, or better yet describe Angela Merkel as charismatic, or as revolutionary? In truth, they are none of these things, but instead might more accurately be described as the same old sort of dull, mundane, predictable and uninspired leaders who have held sway on the European continent for the past 70 years; and so for any of us to expect that things will radically change, whilst such people remain in charge of almost every aspect of our everyday lives, is a forlorn hope at best.
 
If one accepts the basic premise that the best people to govern Britain are the British, the best people to govern Greece are the Greeks, France the French, Germany the Germans, Holland the Dutch, etc. then anything other than a modern, equitable and legally binding trade agreement between the individual nations of Europe is generally unnecessary. Quite why any individual nation state should be compelled to disadvantage itself, just because it happens to be wealthier, more productive, better educated, or more highly paid than its neighbour is an absolutely absurd requirement for any trade organisation to make. Just why should the richer, more successful European states essentially subsidise the poorer and less successful ones, either by paying disproportionately higher subscription fees, by opening their national borders to hordes of migrant workers, by sacrificing their sovereign competencies to foreign influence, or by allowing their historic common laws to be usurped by foreign courts? Where is the equity, or the fairness in that, other than being forced to lose something of intrinsic value, only then to have it replaced with something far less valuable?
 
The fact that Britain's influence is slowly diminishing on both the World and European stage has little to do with the national attitude of its people's, but probably has far more to do with the willingness of successive national governments to defer their authority to other foreign bodies. Despite constituting around 10% of the EU's native population, in terms of voting influence within the European Union, the UK is reported to represent only about 7-8% of the total, even though it is a nuclear power, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, has one of the best funded military's in the world, is one of the largest economies in the world, is a founding member of countless international bodies, including the Commonwealth; and yet we have chosen to deliberately throw away much of that power and influence to remain a member of the EU, which is reputed to be a declining market anyway!
 
For their own safe, unimaginative and entirely selfish reasons our mainstream political elite have decided amongst themselves that Britain should remain politically, economically and socially shackled to a 70-year-old concept of Europeanism that is not just past its sell by date, but has become so rotten that it actively infecting everything else that it touches. One only has to look at the social destruction wrought on Greece, or the military devastation of Ukraine to witness the almost poisonous legacy that this artificial political construct can cause in the hands of those who now guide the EU. That is not to excuse the wastefulness or incompetence of previous Greek administrations, or indeed the expansionist vision of the Russian president Vladimir Putin, but ultimately neither can the European Union's leaders wash their hands of their own complicity in such matters, fuelled as it has been through their own personal vanity and the determination to see their political project grow even further and bigger. And let we Britons not forget that it was our own Prime Minister, David Cameron, who has previously stated that he would be content to see the European Union expand even further East, not only into the Soviet Union itself, but also towards Asia more generally, with both Turkey and Albania being mentioned as possible future members by the Conservative leader. What could possibly go wrong?
 
With British politicians like David Cameron, Ed Miliband, Nichola Sturgeon and Nick Clegg cheering them on from the sidelines, how long do you imagine it will be before the European Union leadership begin their next round of political, economic and social expansionism, assuming of course that the Ukrainian territorial time-bomb that they've helped plant doesn't go off in the meantime? With Conservative, Labour, SNP and Lib Dem connivance just how long will it be before the EU wants to collect more personal data on the millions of citizens that it governs, such as with the soon to be implemented Air Passenger Record, which will no doubt be perused and analysed to an infinite degree by the various security and law enforcement agencies established by the European Union? Surely we should all be worried by an artificial political construct that seeks to establish new and invasive ways of protecting itself from the very citizens it was purportedly set up to serve? Shouldn't each of us be concerned that as the EU grows and expands, the voice of the individual member states within it diminishes to the point that any sort of meaningful national opposition will be ignored? Just how long will it be, before it becomes against the rules, or otherwise impossible, for any single member state to leave the Union, either through force of arms, the threat of international isolation, or even through the possibility of national economic ruin?
 
Only time will tell whether or not Greece's Syriza Party can rescue their country from the EU inspired political, economic and social depression that it has been forced into over the past few years, although it seems unlikely that the European Union will willingly release its grip on the beleaguered nation very easily, as to do would be a tacit admission of failure in the entire project. And because, if Greece were to make the decision to finally escape the entanglement of the European Union, there would be a very real danger that other member states, who find themselves in a similarly difficult situation, such as Portugal, Spain and Italy, might choose to follow Greece's lead and exit the EU as well.
 
Here in the UK, our future relationship with the European Union is hardly straightforward, when one considers that much of the debate surrounding our continued membership tends to consist of generalised misrepresentations, broken electoral promises and downright lies. For the most part though, the vast majority of Britain's political elite, Conservatives, Labour, SNP, Welsh Labour, Scottish Labour and the Liberal Democrats all support our continuing membership of the Union, although with almost the standard codicil of a renegotiation having taken place first. The attachment of such a proviso is of course risible, given that the EU leadership have almost universally announced that the four freedoms on which the project is built, of goods, people, services and capital cannot and will not be renegotiated under any circumstances; and yet the likes of David Cameron, Ed Miliband, Nichola Sturgeon and Nick Clegg still persist with the barefaced lie that they and they alone can convince the other 27 member states to decide otherwise.
 
In reality of course, there is only one British political party dedicated to an immediate In/Out referendum on Britain's membership of the European Union, without trying to deceive the voting public with promises of false renegotiation's, etc. and that party is UKIP. Now, whilst accepting that Nigel Farage is almost certainly one of those "Marmite" politicians that people either love or loathe in equal measure; and that many people will doubtless have bought into the populist media propaganda of UKIP somehow being a party of rampant racists, homophobes, xenophobes and hopeless hysterics, ultimately that doesn't make them liars. Just because they want to prioritise British people in their home country, to re-impose regular border controls on the numbers of foreign migrants coming into the country, or restore some of the standards that have been thoughtlessly discarded by previous governments, that doesn't necessarily make them a bad option when a general election comes around.
 
It is perhaps also worth making the point that even though Nigel Farage may be the leader of the party and the man most closely associated with its public brand, but ultimately Nigel Farage is NOT THE PARTY. The members, the activists and the supporters are THE PARTY, as without them UKIP would not and could not exist, regardless of how charismatic, or "blokey", or likeable Nigel Farage might be as a individual. We do not live in a Presidential-type democracy, no matter how much the three legacy parties would have us believe we do, where it's simply a choice of voting for David Cameron, Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg, or even Nigel Farage. Instead, in a parliamentary democracy we're supposed to be voting for an individual candidate for our particular constituency, which is in theory, the best person to represent us and our home area , regardless of their affiliations or pre-agreed party line.
 
Okay, so UKIP might not be a perfect solution to the many and varied troubles that are affecting our country at present, but I would challenge anyone to point to a mainstream political party that is. The Labour Party isn't the answer and the Conservatives aren't the solution either; and it goes without saying that the Liberal Democrats are definitely not the answer, so what is a person supposed to do, who are they supposed to vote for? Well for me and based entirely on the personal belief that Britain should only ever be governed by the British, that each of their elected councillors and MPs are entitled to serve their constituents, rather than the party line; and based on how their two elected MPs, Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless have conducted themselves in the Commons thus far, then I'll definitely be voting for UKIP in May 2015. They may not be perfect, but at least they represent a start in helping to create the sort of Britain that I personally want to live in, that I want to believe in.

Tuesday 10 February 2015

Creating The Politics Of Fear:

It is hardly reassuring to note that some British politicians think that it's entirely appropriate to think about awarding themselves and their colleagues even more executive powers to wield over the electorate, ostensibly in response to a threat that in reality has probably got little or no foundation.
 
Recalling an earlier BBC programme, which suggested that the Neo-Con movement in America had been in the habit of deliberately overstating the threat posed by a number of foreign enemies, in order to bolster their own right wing policies, it was also implied that much the same sort of propaganda was regularly being used by a number of leading European democracies to similarly alarm and panic their own civil populations, so that they would then be much more amenable to the sorts of repressive and restrictive legislation that the various executives had it in mind to introduce to their individual countries.
 
Rather helpfully for our national governments it would seem, Britain more than most countries, has had a long history of facing and dealing with armed religious and political insurgencies, both from within and without its borders, initially from the likes of the IRA and more recently from any one of the various Al Qaeda affiliates and offshoots that have arisen over the past ten to fifteen years. And while each of these in their turn has posed and continues to pose a direct threat to the life and limbs of perfectly innocent civilians, more importantly and perhaps less obviously to most of us, part of the response to each of these threats has been for the government to introduce numerous pieces of legislation that purport to keep us safer, but at the same time help to steadily erode the traditional civil liberties that we all generally take for granted.
 
Over time, The Race Relations Act 1976, the Public Order Act 1986, the Public Order Act 1994, the Protection From Harassment Act 1997, the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, the Serious Organised Crime & Police Act 2005, the Racial & Religious Hatred Act 2006 and the Terrorism Act 2006 are just a few pieces of legislation that have been enacted by various governments and in each in their turn has impacted negatively on aspects our daily lives. Of course, most of us will be unaware of the new restrictions that such pieces of legislation places on us at a personal level, often because as decent law abiding, tax paying citizens we generally don't come into direct contact, or indeed conflict with the law as we get on with leading our, for the most part mundane and unexciting lives.
 
However, were we to suddenly be taken by the urge to challenge the executive's control over us, in terms of how we can legally assemble, protest, demonstrate, or otherwise oppose the actions of our government, or the law enforcement agencies, then we'd probably very quickly find that we no longer have as many individual "rights" as we first imagined. Ignoring the fact that our traditional "Bobbies on the beat" very rarely pound a beat anywhere any more, increasingly our defenders of the law resemble paramilitary troops, with their stab-proof body armour, their batons, their pepper spray and occasionally even their Tazers or more lethal firearms. We now even have the police's own federation demanding that ALL front line officers be routinely armed with Tazers, even though there is much evidence to suggest that some officers are completely unsuitable to be handed such a potentially lethal device. Clearly, the traditional view that our police forces uphold the law with the public's consent would very quickly be replaced by "policing through force of arms" were some people to have their way; and would doubtless simply represent yet another small step towards the sort of totalitarian regime that these very same people might actually welcome.
 
Who would have thought for instance that a modern British government would reintroduce legislation that allows for armed troops to be placed on the streets of Britain without the explicit approval of parliament? Similarly, who would have imagined that we need legislation to suspend the traditional Bill of Rights 1689, the Act of Habeas Corpus and the Parliament Act of 1911, which restricts each session of parliament to a maximum 5 year term? Why is it that for a protest to be deemed lawful, the organisers of the event must provide the police with a full six day advance notice of their action? How is it that any protest outside of parliament might well lead to those involved being arrested by the police? How is it that we have allowed ourselves to become one of the most surveilled societies in the world, with increasing amounts of CCTV coverage, mail interceptions and phone-tapping all being employed and permitted under the terms of the mass of fairly intrusive security regulations introduced by the Blair government, mostly without any sort of independent judicial oversight?
 
While most of these new laws and regulations are said to have been introduced to address a specific threat to, or problem with our society, be that civil strife, terrorism, or even organised crime, it is often the case that rather than just targeting a specific group, be they criminals or terrorists, the scope of these new and restrictive legislative measures also helps to ensure that the entirely innocent and law abiding citizen might become a victim of them too, always assuming of course that that wasn't the intention to begin with.
 
If you choose to believe that many of these new regulatory powers are generally benign and well intentioned aimed only at restricting the illegal actions of those criminals and terrorists who would threaten our peaceful and law abiding lives, then you probably won't worry too much about having your own personal civil liberties restricted as a result of their introduction. However, if you happen to believe that government, the executive, are more interested in accumulating knowledge and power, in order to consolidate their own positions, then the introduction of such wide ranging legislative measures might be considered to be much more insidious.
 
Although we live in a democracy of sorts, just what kind of democracy is it that deliberately and purposefully uses a fear of the unknown to steal away some of our most basic freedoms from us? If our freedom of speech, our freedom of thought, our freedom to like or dislike, our freedom to tolerate or not, our freedom to dissent, our freedom to oppose, our freedom to communicate, or our freedom to be anonymous is to be taken away from us, can we honestly continue to say that we live in a democracy, where each of those personal freedoms is largely determined by a politically and ideologically driven statute?
 
H L Mencken, an American journalist, essayist and magazine editor once remarked that "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and hence clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
 
Former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski also argued that the use of the term 'War On Terror' was intended "to generate a culture of fear deliberately because it "obscures reason, intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of the policies they want to pursue."
 
Even though there is little doubt that certain groups or individuals exist who would seek to do us harm, either because of political, religious or ethnic extremism, that should not mean that we have to willingly surrender any or all of our hard won personal freedoms in order to protect ourselves from any threatened attacks, most especially when those threats have been entirely invented, or grossly exaggerated with the single intention of reducing our own civil liberties. As has been said before on this blog, government simply cannot hope to successfully legislate for an individual's personal intolerance, antipathy or hatred, simply because that is fundamentally part of the human condition, because people are what they are.
 
Of course government can legislate against a spiteful, hateful or a racist person's behaviour, as the Labour Party of Tony Blair was minded to do, but not without such legislative measures having a hugely catastrophic effect on everyone else too. After all, who determines what may or may not be be deemed as "offensive", what constitutes "incitement", is any sort of publicly expressed criticism over someone else's religion, ethnicity, race, or culture ever "acceptable"?
 
To illustrate the point in one particular way. Recent media reports have suggested that anti-semitism is on the rise in the UK, a troubling event at any time, but perhaps more notably given the recent deadly attacks in France, where the Jewish community was known to have been specifically targeted by Islamic gunmen. Interestingly, when looking at the initial reports a few weeks ago, there seems to have been a generalised view that this rise in anti-semitic attacks was actually the responsibility of the British people at large, which as a native Briton, I was more than a little surprised to learn. However, having done a little bit of research online there was then a second school of thought that suggested that the most striking increase in reports of anti-semitism were based in the likes of London, where as most people now accept the indigenous white English population constitute a minority group, having largely been displaced by other racial and ethnic communities. If indeed that happens to be the case, that anti-semitism is on the rise in places like London, where non-native communities are in the majority, then all of a sudden that places an entirely different perspective on the original report, suggesting that any such increase, has very little to do with the white English community, but rather is linked to those non-native groups who have replaced them.
 
The point is, that only a few days ago on the BBC's Daily Politics show, it was actually being suggested that in response to this supposedly "country wide" rise in anti-semitism, that perhaps even more formal parliamentary legislation was required to deal with the problem, even though no-one has yet proved conclusively or indeed independently that a problem actually exist at all. Yet despite the fact that we have some of the most repressive and restrictive social legislation anywhere in the world, it was still being suggested that we might need some more. Once again though, this particular instance goes to prove, just how easy it is to create a climate of fear amongst parts of the population; and then introduce legislation in response to it, something that we seem to have been doing regularly for the past forty years or so; and yet we still don't seem to have learned from the mistake, we just keep repeating it. 

Monday 9 February 2015

Vote Labour. Vote For The Mob:

In ancient Rome, the "mob" was more commonly known as the mobile vulgus and much as today its general purpose was to bully, intimidate, harass or isolate those individuals who had become the subject of their attention, whether that was a politician, a businessman, a work colleague, or even a social leader. Earlier still, the Greek philosopher, Diogenes, had recognised the potential power and the dangers posed by the "mob", when he noted that "the mob is the mother of tyrants", while the Greek historian, Herodotus, was reported to have said that "there is nothing more foolish, nothing more given to outrage, than a useless mob". Fast forward two thousand years, to one of the most chilling single episodes in human history and a Christian mob, incited by Nazi propagandists, visited a deathly pogrom against the Jews of Germany, which resulted in 91 people being killed, 30,000 being arrested and imprisoned, 7,000 Jewish businesses destroyed and 1,000 synagogues being burned. Of course, this particular incident wasn't an isolated one, it had happened before and it has happened since, sometimes with deliberate and centralised incitement, sometimes without, but in either case, it illustrates just what lengths a mob can go to, once they lose control of themselves, or indeed one another.
 
Now, while no-one is suggesting that such outrageous and murderous acts could or would be committed today in a modern western society, at least not without the implicit permission of a ruling government party, it is perhaps worth reminding ourselves that even Britain has been the subject of regular breakdowns in our normally law abiding society, with large scale riots having taken place in 1910, 1919, 1936, 1958, 1972, 1974, 1976, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1985, 1987, 1990, 1995, 1996, 2001, 2005, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011, with only good luck, rather than good judgement determining that there wasn't any large scale loss of life as a result of them.
 
Of course the causes of these numerous British riots have been many and varied, with perhaps underlying racial tensions and perceived or real discrimination being at the root of most; and for the most part there was probably no intention that anyone would get seriously hurt, no properties would be destroyed, or that matters would escalate so badly. Also, in most of these cases there was probably very little centralised planning or co-ordination about how the initial demonstration would evolve, how it would take on a life of its own, as it were, escalating from a public display of specific grievance, to an all out episode of lawlessness. Contrast that with the extreme case of the Nazi inspired Kristelnacht, where there was centrally orchestrated plot to agitate and motivate the mob into a deadly frenzy, ostensibly in pursuit of the party's policy to alienate and subjugate the resident German Jewish community.
 
The Oxford English dictionary defines a "mob" as "a large crowd of people, especially one that is disorderly and intent on causing trouble or violence", as for example a mob of protesters, or a group of people in the same place, or with something in common. Taking that quite literally, it would not therefore be unreasonable to assume that a crowd of people gathering in the same place, in a common cause, with a shared intention of causing trouble, or inciting violence, might quite easily be described as a "mob", not simply because they are publicly displaying their shared opposition to something or someone, but rather because their actual shared intent is to either cause trouble, or incite violence against the thing, or the person that they're opposed to. Depending on your interpretation of "trouble", then one might imagine that deliberately preventing a business, a political organisation, or even a legitimate political representative from going about their lawful business might be deemed to be "causing trouble", thereby making the demonstrators a "mob".
 
Increasingly it seems to be becoming an almost common event for organised groups of politically inspired demonstrators to use this particular tactic to not only stifle the sort of free speech that they don't personally agree with, but also to impinge on the lawful activities of those people that they oppose politically. Recent events in Rotherham, where UKIP leader Nigel Farage was virtually imprisoned in his party's campaign shop, apparently on the advice of the local police; and due entirely to the actions of a small mob, specifically designed for the job by a number of Labour Party affiliates, is just one of a growing number of instances where mob rule seems to be the norm. Even though the police would have been well within their rights to clear the protesters away from the shop, on the grounds that the demonstrators were causing an obvious obstruction, instead it seems they were more inclined to defer to the rights of the mob, than to the legal entitlement of a democratically elected political representative to open his party's new office. It clearly hadn't gone without notice that not only were two former Labour councillors amongst the mob besieging the office, but also a group called TUSC, whilst local Labour MP Sarah Champion thought it appropriate to accuse Mr Farage of "rubber necking" about the child sexual exploitation scandal that has engulfed the town.
 
Of course, this isn't the first time that Nigel Farage has been besieged by a baying mob, having previously been forced to retire to a public house in Edinburgh to escape the threats, the intimidation, the bullying tactics employed by his opponents. And like many of his political contemporaries he has been "egged", which seems to have become an almost common occurrence within British political life; and something that the police seem less likely to deal with as each individual incident occurs. However, when a physical assault is perpetrated against anyone it is bad enough, but for a campaigning politician to be attacked for no obvious reason, other than a personal difference of opinion over policy, then surely we have a serious problem to contend with. This isn't just mob rule designed to harass, intimidate or bully, but to actually incite violence against the person, which I'm sure most right thinking people would oppose under any circumstances. The attack, by protester Andrew Scott, although not serious, simply helps illustrate just how easily a mob mentality, when ignored, or even implicitly approved of by the police and other mainstream political parties can easily get out of hand with the potential for people to get seriously hurt. In this particular instance, it was a placard that was used in the assault, but how long one wonders before something far more lethal is used by a member of one of these mobs with the intention of simply putting their political point across or into their opponents?
 
It should be a matter of concern for everyone involved with our democracy that the minds of our "brightest and best", our young people, can so easily be corrupted by what purport to be legitimate political groupings, such as Hope Not Hate, or Unite Against Fascism, or any of those other organisations that are either funded by, or otherwise supported by the supposedly mainstream Labour Party and its Trade Unions paymasters. The fact that so many young people are being regularly influenced by or indoctrinated by the singularly warped views and policies of a small number of generally unknown, unaccountable and unrepresentative individuals, who use their positions to usurp our normal democratic practices and institutions should unsettle us all, regardless of our own personal political standpoint.
 
It is alarming to think that there is a small army of youthful dedicated political activists abroad in our country who not only pursue their leaders bidding in a generally single minded and unquestioning fashion, but that they also seem to think that bullying, intimidation and even silencing their opponents through violent acts, is an acceptable way to conduct political discourse. Unsurprisingly perhaps, at least one of the better known political activists, who holds no democratic mandate, or indeed elected public office, has freely admitted to the media that as she is not seeking election herself, then she feels perfectly entitled to lie about, shout down and generally damage her political opponent's reputation, without any fear of party or personal censure. Now, if she was a single disgruntled individual carrying out such actions then that is one thing, but where one individual becomes part of a co-ordinated and centralised strategy of political disruption, designed purely to suborn the entire democratic process, then perhaps we should all be concerned about that? After all, wasn't it exactly those sorts of undemocratic tactics that were commonly employed during the 1920's and 1930's in much of Western Europe and remember how that turned out?
 
There is something deeply worrying about any large scale un-elected and publicly unaccountable street movement that is not only being funded by government and the Trades Union movement, but also feels able to target those individuals, or political organisations that they alone deem to be unacceptable, even though the targets themselves are legitimately elected representative bodies or politicians. How would it be do you think if David Cameron, Ed Miliband or Nick Clegg was advised by the local police NOT to leave their campaign office, or NOT to walk down the street, or NOT to hold a local meeting, because a handful of generally unrepresentative protesters were making a nuisance of themselves? The obvious conclusion is of course that it wouldn't happen, simply because people wouldn't stand for the democratic process being usurped by a bunch of noisy demonstrators, who are fundamentally pursuing their own narrow political agenda. And yet where it wouldn't or couldn't happen for the Conservatives, Labour or the Liberal Democrats, it seems perfectly okay for it to happen not once, but twice for the same publicly elected UKIP representative, despite the fact that the party garnered over 4 million votes in the last European Elections, presently has 23 MEPs in the European Parliament and 2 MPs in our National Parliament.
 
Contrast UKIP's electoral standing, having chosen to put themselves forward at a public ballot, with the elected representation of United Against Fascism, Hope Not Hate or even the entire Trades Union movement. How many MPs or MEPs do UAF, HnH, or the TUC have? How many people in this country have actually voted for the UAF or HnH, or indeed what they stand for?
 
Even though such groups would claim that they have taken it upon themselves to confront the sorts of extremism that often exists within our society, whether that be in terms of a person's race, sexuality, ethnicity or religious beliefs, just who exactly asked them, or gave them permission to do so in the first place? It certainly wasn't the British electorate at large, as for the most part ordinary people probably wouldn't even be aware of them. And who exactly gives them licence to determine who or what should be targeted by their supporters, who is a fascist, or a racist, or an extremist? It certainly isn't the vast bulk of the general public. The truth is that groups such as the UAF, HnH and even parts of the TUC, especially those unions who fund the UAF and HnH directly or indirectly, are not legitimate democratic bodies, in the sense that they enjoy the widespread public support; and as such have no legitimate mandate for their actions.
 
Accepting that to be true, then one can only conclude that such groups were only ever created, maintained and funded for one particular purpose, that is to bring together groups of people with a common aim, of either causing trouble for, or inciting violence against a given opponent, which by any measure is a reasonable definition of a "mob". For anyone who believes that mob rule is the way forward for our "democracy", then please feel free to vote for the likes of the Labour Party, the Trades Union movement, or even for their affiliates like Unite Against Fascism, Hope Not Hate, the Socialist Workers Party, or any one of the other progressive fringe groups who claim to act in your name, or in your interests, but please don't expect that they have any interests in pursuing an agenda that's best suited for the majority of the British populations, as they're far too busy pursuing their own!

Friday 6 February 2015

The Longest Act Of National Suicide In History:

Having previously scoffed at the suggestion that we indigenous Britons might well be out-bred by foreign incomers anytime soon, that is not to say that our traditional way of life, our historic cultures, our well founded practices, or indeed our accepted means and norms are entirely safe from malignant and regressive outside influences.
 
After all, thirty or forty years ago, who would have imagined that in 21st century Britain, we would still be permitting the barbaric medieval slaughter of animals for food, when much more modern and humane methods are available? Who would have believed that in a largely gender neutral state, we would still be permitting women to be regarded as or treated as second-class citizens, or worse still, as mere chattels? Why would a country with one of the most evolved and secular legal systems in the world willingly choose to defer some of its own judicial authority to what are fundamentally ancient religious courts?
 
Why is a modern, generally secular state so instinctively averse to clamping down on religious fundamentalism and intolerance, or the grotesque, illegal and outdated cultural practices such as female genital mutilation, forced marriages, or the widespread and almost industrialised targeting of white girls for sexual exploitation? Why has it become almost acceptable for non-English speakers to live and work in our country for years on end, without having put any sort of effort into learning our language, either written or spoken? How has it become permissible for religious fundamentalists to covertly take over the running of some of our schools, thereby allowing them the opportunity to influence and corrupt some of our youngest and most precious minds? In a similar vein, how have we reached a point that small groups of young men, holding wholly unrepresentative fundamentalist views, are free to wander the streets of our country verbally or physically attacking those who don't share their faith or their opinions?
 
How is it that we have allowed the re-emergence of the "rotten borough", where religious and ethnic based bigotry, politically correct incompetence and outright criminality have become acceptable everyday activities? How have we managed to reach a point that in the coming general election, the most important for a generation, a small number of parliamentary seats will not only be influenced by, but might actually be decided by, those ballots cast by non-British born voters? How by any measure, can it be right for any single minority to have such influence on our political classes that it is only their needs, their opinions, their beliefs, their demands and their agendas that hold sway over those of the mainly silent majority? 
 
If we cannot defend, or deliberately choose not to protect those things that make us who we are as a people, that distinguish our national identity from all of the others in the world, then won't that make us all equally complicit in the long term destruction of the British nation, which will almost inevitably be the long term outcome of our own inaction and indifference. If a nation is defined as "a large body of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language and inhabiting a particular state or territory then surely all four nations of the United Kingdom, are equally at risk of losing their shared history, culture, languages, as well as the rest of their commonly held practices, if we allow things to continue as they are.
 
After all, if we continue as we are, having increasing numbers of migrants settling from all over the world, then how can we realistically claim to have any sort of common descent? If our commonly shared histories continue to be revised, ignored and repudiated then how do we remain united through a mutual celebration of them? If our shared and traditional cultural practices are amended, proscribed or demeaned, simply through fear of offending another minority group's cultural sensitivities, then what hope is there for the British people? If we are content to have our common historic languages and regional dialects undermined by the forced introduction of a plethora of foreign and generally unfathomable tongues, then where is the commonality, or the national unity in that? If what remains of our traditional national religions continue to be further marginalised and challenged by what is fundamentally a minor foreign faith, then just how long will it be before its values, its laws, its interpretation begin to supplant those that have existed in Britain for well over 1500 years?
 
Clearly, there is an argument to be made that Britain, its history, its culture, and its languages has been built through foreign immigration in one form or another, whether through military invasion, commercial enterprise, or through simple human resettlement. Of course nobody with a modicum of commonsense, or a reasonable grasp of our island's history would dispute that, but it is absurd to try and equate what happened over a nearly two thousand year period of our country's history, to what has happened over the past forty or fifty years. In between each of the great influxes of foreigners to Britain, whether that was the Romans, the Anglo Saxons, the Vikings or the Normans, there were also significant periods of peace, stability and perhaps more importantly assimilation, where these outside influences, with their various foreign cultures, practices and tongues were absorbed into the prevailing British way of life, whilst also adding their own distinct flavour, in order to create a new and improved nation state.
 
Contrast that particular social outcome with what we're being forced to accept today. Not only have we been unwittingly compelled to accept millions of foreign migrants arriving on our shores, speaking a multitude of languages, holding a host of disparate cultural practices, believing in a plethora of foreign deities and containing a significant core who have no real interest in, or intention of integrating themselves into the prevailing British way of life. Instead, they are more than content to set themselves and their communities apart from the British mainstream, to retain their own cultural practices, their own native languages, their own belief systems and even their own legal and economic services. What is particularly ironic about this, is that most will still claim that they have migrated to Britain to benefit from the freedoms that it offers, freedom from religious and social persecution, from financial corruption, from economic stagnation, from religious fundamentalism, from sexual exploitation, from social isolation and a host of other man-made miseries that they claim to be escaping; and yet as soon as they arrive in Britain, they immediately begin to replicate the very same sort of society and social ills that they claim to be escaping from.
 
Despite what certain elements of the media would have us believe, perhaps Britain's greatest weakness is its people's tolerance, the inherent willingness to believe and to help those who we perceive to be worthy of our aid, even to the point of disadvantaging ourselves by doing so. In other words, we're suckers for almost any hard luck story we're told and as a direct consequence our tolerance and goodwill is regularly taken advantage of by any "chancer" who has a sad story to tell. How else would you explain our almost insane tolerance towards those elected political representatives who routinely lie, cheat and steal, yet still get re-elected? How else could you explain the fact that we give away billions of pounds in Foreign Aid to some of the undeserving causes and nations in the world today? How is it that we routinely offer sanctuary to some of the world's most vicious and despicable criminals? Exactly how is it that two minor religions in the UK have managed to dictate the way in which a significant number of our food animals are slaughtered, without the majority of us having been asked or informed beforehand? How is it exactly that we've arrived at a point in our country's history that a regional police force seems to be more concerned about protecting the sensitivities of an ethnic minority community than they are about upholding the actual rule of law? Just why is it that we deem it acceptable for young men born in Britain to set off across the world to murder, rape and loot in a foreign land and when they have had enough to simply come back home and face justice here, rather than in the lands where they committed their heinous offences?
 
If, as the old expression says, a house divided against itself cannot stand, then where exactly does that leave modern Britain and what does the future hold if we continue on our present path? After all, not only do we have our traditional and long held laws and culture being altered and diminished, not only do we have increasing numbers of foreign enclaves and ghettoes establishing themselves within our major towns and cities, but we also appear to have our ruling political classes actively trying to dismember the country by nationality, by region and even by city area. Were they to be successful in their aims, where would that leave Britain then, with the English, the Scots, the Welsh and the Northern Irish all separate; and all competing to promote their own individual nationalist causes, rather than a single British one? Worse still, where would Britain be, if England began to be divided down into its various regional entities, with Yorkshire trying to compete against Lancashire, or the North East competing against the North West, where would their common British ties be then? How could we profess to be a single unified modern nation, when neighbour was set against neighbour, region against region, city against city and the country was largely put back to a time not seen since the Anglo Saxon "heptarchy". By no stretch of the imagination could that be seen as a progressive move for our country, but perhaps represents the biggest retrograde step our nation have ever taken in the past two thousand years.
 
When in 1983 the late Michael Foot MP, the then leader of the Labour Party, decided to campaign on the most left-wing manifesto in a generation, one of his colleagues, Gerald Kaufman MP, described the document as the "longest suicide note in history", in recognition of the fact that such rabid left-wing policies would not be that appealing to the British electorate, which indeed proved to be the case. In a sense, by virtue of placing such policies in front of the British people, Mr Foot virtually ensured the electoral destruction of his own party for the next 14 years, through his own leadership, that of Neil Kinnocks and right through to Tony Blair, who finally returned Labour to power, as New Labour, in 1997.
 
Similarly, it might well be argued that from the perspective of Britain's national identity, in terms of its shared common descent, its history, its culture and its language, we have already allowed so much of them to be sacrificed on the relatively new dual altars of multiculturalism and political correctness, without actually recognising the importance of their loss to our traditional way of lives. If things like common descent, history, culture and language truly do define our nationality, or our nationhood, then will their diminution through our own inactivity, apathy and overt tolerance almost inevitably lead to their final disappearance; and if it does, what will we have to call ourselves then, Europeans? Just like Michael Foot was thought to have destroyed Old Labour through his outdated left wing policy manifesto, could it not be argued that anyone who continues to vote for the increasingly progressive legacy parties, the LibLabCon, are equally guilty of helping to commit the "longest act of national suicide in history", the death of traditional Britain as we know it?