On the Left, when commentators are groping for an argument, it is an occasional theme is to attack the Daily Mail for having supported Oswald Mosley’s British Fascist movement for a time 80 years ago in the 1930s.

The line has become a standard Aunt Sally to provide prejudicial background in pieces about the Mail. Picking a piece from the front page of Google, here’s Anita Roddick on her own site back in 2006:

How tired I am of the pious pontificating of the Daily Mail towards the next move in my business life, and after their article on Saturday just look at what I’ve dug up about the Daily Mail and it’s historic link with Hitler’s Nazi party – what an anti-Semitic past it had.

when she quoted Ken Livingstone from the Guardian

Associated Newspapers has always led the charge against the policies that confront racism and anti-semitism. It praised the Blackshirts in the 1930s, and admits that as recently as the retirement party of the last editor of the Daily Mail, two of its staff dressed in Nazi uniforms and were not asked to leave.

Owen Jones has positioned the Daily Mail ‘campaigning for a Fascist State in Britain’ as a background feature in the possible ‘Death of British Democracy’ through over-zealous policing of political protest.

Owen also gives walk-on parts to policing of flying pickets in the Miners’ Strike, the (incorrect) use of Anti Terrorism stop and search powers against Walter Wolfgang, and the use of the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 against persistent anti-Arms Trade demonstrators :

If you were a genuine democrat at the turn of 1937, you would have been scared. Fascism was on the march across Europe. Italy had fallen first; German Nazism had shut down the world’s greatest labour movement virtually overnight and was upping the persecution of the Jews; and a fascist-backed military coup against Spain’s left-leaning government had plunged the country into a nightmare civil war.

Here in Britain, Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts – backed by the likes of the Daily Mail – were loudly agitating for a fascist government on the European model. Could British democracy fall next? Without the benefit of hindsight, and with the tragic complacency of many imprisoned (or dead) European leftists seared on to your recent memory, you could not be sure that the lights would not go out here, too.

He suggests that there’s a realistic parallel between the 1930s and now, as if there is some threat to democracy in the UK when protests with a record of turning violent are controlled.

The Daily Mail even gets a walk on part at media blog Enemies of Reason – and Steven Baxter is at least 7,940,287 times more sensible than Anita Roddick ever was:

It’s no different today, with many readers getting angry with the way the Mail reports the story and calls the EDL a ‘magnet for neo-Nazi thugs’ and compares them with Oswald Moseley’s Blackshirts (who, as we all know, the Daily Mail supported back in the day, but that’s by the by).

I came across a counterpoint to the Mosley-Mail spectre, in a book by Matthew Sweet I’m currently reading: “The West End Front: The Wartime Secrets of London’s Grand Hotels” (*) highlighting casual  Antisemitism:

“I am going back to a quiet family life, and shall do my best to forget what has happened in the past”, [Josephine] Green told the Daily Mirror, which pictured her sitting on the sofa of her parents’ home on Park Lane. The copy-editor chose to pull out, underline and embolden four words from the story – ‘Rich Jew of 75′ – a phrase calculated to invoke the disgust of the reader.

The three other most prominent elements on the page were a photograph of a Red Cross nurse tending a casualty on a rubble-strewn pavement , a portrait of a blonde seven-year-old pulled from the ruins of a bombed house , and a report from Glasgow about a pair of convicted war profiteers with the un-Hibernian names of Max Schönbach and Benjamin Brazil”.

This was 29 October 1940, and the paper was the Daily Mirror.

Similarly, while the Mail is made famous for a “Hurrah for the Blackshirts” headline in 1934 – which features in the Mail’s Wikipedia entry, the Mirror ran – in the same month – a piece entitled “Give the Blackshirts a helping hand”.

You won’t find it featured in the Wikipedia article about the Mirror, though.

So, am I defending the Mail?

No, just pointing out the weakness of any argument which has to pick up a label from almost a century ago to try and win an argument in 2011.

That no more wins a debate than does pointing out that John Reid or Lord Mandelson used to be Communists before they grew up, or that George Osborne had an interesting ‘dalliance’ at University.

I was going to put in a photo of the whole Mirror page in this article, but I was thwarted by our wonderful new British Newspaper Archive which was all over the media yesterday. The archive, created by the taxpayer-funded British Library from a taxpayer-funded National Archive, turns out to be charging taxpayers to look at the things which already belong to us. In any case, they have not yet reached 1940.

By contrast, the Library of Congress from the Land of the Evil Capitalists applies no significant restrictions to its online newspaper archive.

Back in 2003 the Independent ran an article by Chris Horrie, author of “Tabloid Nation: From the birth of the Mirror to the death of the tabloid newspaper“, which explored the subject of the Daily Mirror’s ‘forgotten’ history.

 On Monday, 22 January, 1934 the Mirror ran the headline “Give the Blackshirts a helping hand”. The paper went one further than the Mail, urging readers to join Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, and giving the address to which to send membership applications.

“As a purely British organisation, the Blackshirts will respect those principles of tolerance which are traditional in British politics,” the Mirror told readers, complaining that “timid alarmists” had “been whimpering that the rapid growth in numbers of the British Blackshirts is preparing the way for a system of rulership by means of steel whips and concentration camps”.

This was nonsense, the Mirror said, the result of ignorance of the reality of “Blackshirt government” in Hitler’s Germany: “The notion that a permanent reign of terror exists there has been evolved entirely from their own morbid imaginations, fed by sensational propaganda from opponents of the party now in power.”

The paper added that anyone who had visited Germany or Mussolini’s Italy “would find that the mood of the vast majority of their inhabitants was not cowed submission but confident enthusiasm.”

The Mirror’s Sunday sister paper, then known as The Pictorial, followed up with a Hello!-style picture essay showing uniformed blackshirt paramilitaries playing table tennis and enjoying a sing-song around the piano while off duty inside the Black House, Mosley’s barracks-cum-dungeon on London’s King’s Road.

The Mirror and the Pictorial also planned a photographic beauty contest aimed at finding Britain’s prettiest woman fascist – though Mosley personally objected to this, saying the paper was trivialising his movement.

This article has vanished from the Independent website, but not the Google cache – so I have uploaded a copy here.

(*) I recommend Matthew Sweet’s the book in small chunks; it’s an extended gossip about goings-on at high end hotels in the war years. A good one for the lavatory, like Private Eye, that is a bit much in chunks bigger than about 10 minutes.

Dark side of the Daily Mirror is a post from: Anna Raccoon

9/11: Muslim vs Muslim is a post from: Anna Raccoon

This is a crosspost from Malpoet’s Weblog.

In the wake of the riots we were bombarded with competing claims about who controlled them. The police are sure that the successful tactics were evolved by them while the politicians say that it all got sorted when they returned from holiday.

I think that the riots stopped because the weather turned bad, but there is a serious issue about who should do what in keeping us safe from crime.

The government have said that they will scrap the costly and useless police authorities and replace them with elected commissioners. Well OK, but what exactly is a commissioner? The chief of the Met Police is called the Commissioner whereas the people who run all other UK police forces are called Chief Constables. If the Metropolitan Police Authority is to be replaced by an elected commissioner they are going to have to sort out the titles.

The real issue, of course, is what part of policing should be decided by politicians and what is decided by the police chief.

The standard answer is that policy is for politicians and operational matters are the responsibility of the uniformed cops. But where exactly is the line drawn between these? Many libertarians support the idea of directly elected police control in some form because they want policing priorities to be responsive to citizen concerns and they also wish to get policing to be closer to specific community conditions. These are legitimate aspirations, but I would suggest that focusing on election of a figurehead does not address the right issue.

Britain is unlike most other countries in its insistence on largely having a single police service in which personnel deal with everything from dropping litter to multiple murder, parking infringement to complex fraud. This is all done through 43 different police forces, roughly relating to counties, that are far too big to provide genuine local accountability and much too small to address large scale, organised crime.

The apprehension of criminals and even the prevention of crime is a technical process which most people would agree requires skills, experience, training and a high degree of efficiency. Quite obviously these are things which require stability and are not compatible with the turnover resulting from elections or the absence of appropriate background that election candidates are likely to have. Whatever title you give them, the operational head of any level of policing cannot and must not be determined by popular election.

At present, Police Authorities do not perform any worthwhile role. They are meant to be the means by which Chief Constables, or the Met Commissioner, are accountable for the performance of themselves and their force. The reality is that the Authority is composed primarily of Councillors selected by the local authority who have no knowledge of policing and no idea how to hold the professionals to account. Serving on the Police Authority is just another little source of responsibility allowance and a diverting couple of hours from time to time.

An elected person with specific responsibility for setting policy frameworks for police and holding the Chief constables to account would have more focus and authority and might gain sufficient insight to be able to probe the effectiveness of the force if s/he held office for long enough. The problem is that this doesn’t deal with the problem of getting policing organised on an appropriate scale to deal with the whole range of crime and public safety that is required. Also, in those places which have an executive mayor, particularly London, the elected Police Commissioner is going to be a competing figure to the mayor and a dilution of the executive mayor role.

A few years ago it was unquestioned that only the state could run prisons and handle prisoners. Now we have many privately owned and run gaols and prisoner transport is largely contracted out. Tiny steps have been taken to improve policing by de-criminalising some traffic management roles and introducing Police Community Support staff to deal with anti-social behaviour and petty crime.

Even these micro moves have been met with implacable hostility from the Police Federation which, although they are prohibited from organising industrial action, is one of the most intransigent and powerful trade unions in the country. Apart from the rank and file union, the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) is a formidable barrier to reform. ACPO is the senior officers trade union, but at the same time it gets large amount of taxpayers money so it is one of those strange hybrid organisations by which the state extends its tendrils where they shouldn’t be.

Financial pressures brought about change in the prison system and that will go further. The present economic constraints should be an aid to breaking the massive institutional barriers to police reform.

The way forward is to go ahead with abolition of Police Authorities. In those areas with an executive mayor policing should become part of his/her responsibility. In the rest of the country an elected police commissioner would be OK.

The real job though is to get the right sort of policing. Major crime and the contingency arrangements for large scale incidents must be coordinated nationally and internationally.

All motoring offences, which does not include such things as manslaughter by use of a vehicle, should be de-criminalised. The task of enforcing the civil motoring laws needs to be contracted out to private providers. Local crime and crime prevention needs to be separated into its specialisms of theft and burglary, rape and sexual offences, fraud, etc. and delivered in the manner chosen by the communities they serve.

It is my view that the vast majority of policing and public safety would be best handled by private contractors, but there is no reason why mayors or commissioners should not keep it as a directly employed service or a mixture of public and private provision.

Photo Credit: Student Life.

Separating Politics and Policing is a post from: Anna Raccoon

This is from the Labour Party’s Annual Report and Accounts, registered with the Electoral Commission, on page 19:

“Following the UK Government’s announcement in summer 2010, the inflation index to be used to derive statutory pensions increases has been changed from the Retail Prices Index (RPI) to the Consumer Prices Index (CPI). Due to a number of differences between the indices, including both constituents and construction, CPI is expected to be less than RPI over the long-term which means that the defined benefit obligation has reduced.

Following discussions with our pension advisors, we have recognised the reduction as an assumption change. The change has been recognised at 31 December 2010 and the overall impact of this is a reduction of £4.2m in the value of the defined benefit obligations.”

And this is Early Day Motion 1629, put down to oppose the same Permanent Change from RPI to CPI in statutory pensions increases in the Public Sector:

That this House considers that the Pensions Increase (Review) Order 2011 (S.I., 2011, No. 827) which was laid before this House on 17 March 2011 should be withdrawn because the Order requires the uprating of public sector pensions using the consumer price index, replacing the retail price index which the Government has indicated will be a permanent change; notes that the Government has refused to heed arguments that a temporary three year change to the index used would represent a fair contribution from benefits and pension recipients, at a time when wage growth generally is suppressed, to reducing the deficit whilst not unfairly impacting on their incomes over the longer term; but regrets that the Government has instead indicated that the change is permanent, leaving public sector workers and the poorest in society disadvantaged permanently, yearafter year, even once the deficit is gone and earnings growth has returned.

Who proposed Early Day Motion 1629?

Why – one Ed Milliband MP.

Ed Miliband MP: Use RPI not CPI for Pensions

Contradiction? Hypocrisy?

Never.

The Labour Party is not in the Public Sector.

Original spot of Labour Accounts via Guido.

Ed Miliband’s Money Quote on Pensions is a post from: Anna Raccoon

Crimewatcher

Good Evening and Welcome to CRIMEWATCHER.

On tonight’s show we will be exposing a fraud so massive that it has affected everyone alive today in the UK, as well as those of the next 3 future generations. Your great great grandchildren will have to pay for the weaknesses for this generation.

This crime has been carried out by a highly disorganised criminal syndicate known as the “Public Sector” gang, and encouraged via their criminal associates in the Triad Unions, Uncivil Servants, the Bolshevic Broadcasting Community, and the GuardiaNazi Paperazi.

The ConservaNostra seem to lack the will to sort the problem.

Background:

Like many criminal organisations around the world the PS Gang have humble roots amongsts the people, but over the years they grew to become dictatorial regimes involved in extortion, fraud, street violence, threatening behaviour, theft, blackmail – to name a few. They enfore their own shallow idealism on society through a set of rules known as political correctness. Like many Mafia organisations they front their businesses on municipal services to hide a darker reality. They control the streets, they extort from the businesses, and they seem immune to prosecution.

This latest fraud is not new, but like all fraudsters the PS Gang are greedy and they kept taking more and more until their was nothing left to leach and their crimes have become exposed. It seems that this fraud has been so severe that the National Bosses of de ConservaNostra have sent one of their lightweights Fanny Alexander to try and smooth things over as they suspect that this latest fraud will end up reducing their take.

How does this scam operate. It is highly complex and involved quite a few players working in inconjuction.

The Organisation & Players:

Within the gang there are many operatives with specific responsibilties. The ConservaNostra collect all the protection money through one of their offshoots the much feared HMRC. This money is then divided within the organisation, but the PS Gang has become to powerful and greedy that they have demanded an increase in their share, even when the total stolen by the ConservaNostra has reduced.

They have threatened to start a war on the streets between the militia of the Triad Unions and the ConservaNostra enforcers if they do not get more.

The problems began when The Public Sector Gang started recruiting & promoting people with allegiance to the Triad Unions, who then Extort from the ConservaNostra for more money on behalf of the PS Gang or face the threat of  violent war on the streets.

The Triad Union collect protection money from the PS Gang, which they hope to get back after the Triad Unions extort from the ConservaNostra. This increases the money available to the PS Gang, to increase their power and numbers and thus increase the amount they pay in return to the Triad Unions, who increase their power and then extort more from the Convervanostra who in turn take more money from the Tax Payer.

It is an ever increasing circle of extortion, threat and blackmail, all paid for by the poor Tax Payer and an ever decreasing economy.

While this is going on the PS Gang pay the British Bolshevic Community (BBC) to cajole Tax Payers to pay up more and more by constantly broadcasting threats to get the children at school, get your mother at hospital, let crime happen to you, cut off your power supply; even simple things like stop your bins from being collected every week unless their extravagant demands are met.

They are backed by a smaller and somewhat insignificant group called the GuardiaNazi Paperazi but they are mostly an irrelevant publication who really only get wide access to the Public when they are given a platform by the BBC. One example of this is the banshee Polpot Toynabski who seems to be perpetually available or involved with the Triad Union Militia Youth Clubs.

Recently they attacked the Royal Family and the City of London after being asked to repay some of the money they are borrowing. The BBC & the GuardiaNazi constantly reference each other as sources of scare stories creating a wall of Lefty politicals in a muppet like Echo Chamber.

The BBC and the GuardiaNazis are also involved in trying to bring back the old bosses of the most dreaded ZaNu Liebore Gang whose last 14 year rampage left a trail of death, poverty and missery. The ZaNu Liebore Gang is run by two brothers, like their KGB employed father they are a danger to the public. They are currently on the Not Wanted List where they should remain in future.

Like all good Mafia organisations the PS Gang have influence with high ranking religious officials like the Arsebishop of Cantenbury, who is also a member of the PS Gang.

The Latest Scam:

The Triad Unions have demanded that the PS Gang continue to receive massive payments when they retire from inactive service. Since the Tax Payer cannot afford to pay the PS Gang this obscene amount being extorted any more. Their is a short fall in the PS Gang finances called the PS Borrowing Requirement.

The PS Gang & the Triad Unions are trying to force the ConservaNostra to borrow Billions on behlaf of the Tax Payer every month to keep the fraud going but the ConservaNostra think they are stealing enough and that any more might cause the Tax Payer to fightback then they will all be out of the Scam as the International Mafia Force (IMF) will step in and take over.

So members of the public please be on your guard, watch out for members of the PS Gang, the Triad Unions and the members of their extended crime syndicate that we have labels “Socialists” sometimes known as “Theiving Lefty Numpties”.

Remember you are being robbed and the world will crumble like a modern Greek Tragedy some time soon unless this stops. Sleep well while you still have a roof above your head as the end is nigh.

Do not be scared, if we stand together they will be in trouble. They all have mortgages, credit cards, holidays to pay, cars to run. They will be on strike for a few days at most. If they can afford to strike longer then they are already doing too good and need their salaries cut even more.

Photo credit

Crimewatcher is a post from: Anna Raccoon

We look at the devastation wrought on Japan and recoil in horror. So many lives lost, so many homes to be rebuilt, so much employment lost for ever.

An earthquake, followed by a Tsunami, followed by an explosion in their nuclear plant. Could any country suffer more? It is a vision of Armageddon that we can all understand.

The insurance industry are saying today that it will cost around £38 billion pounds to put it right. It gives us a reference point to see what £38 billion can do.

Can I just point out that that figure is £2 billion less than the £40 billion pounds the Conservative government are planning to borrow next year in order to finance the damage that hurricane Gordon wreaked on this country? A figure which is regularly referred to by the BBC as a ‘savage cut targeting the most vulnerable’.

Gaze on the horrific images from Japan and ponder just how much you could put right with £38 billion if you weren’t borrowing it to keep the whingers quiet.

Adam Collyer has an excellent post today, pointing out the demographics of Red Ed’s demand that we borrow more money – the working man paying more of his wage over to the capitalist bankers. Ironic, and worth reading in full.

The Price of Devastation. is a post from: Anna Raccoon

The Government becomes ever more inventive in getting Nanny’s message across. Now beer mats and beer glasses are to display the calorie count – will they have a different glass for each beer? Fast food chains and sandwich bars are to display calorie counts on menus – will Dirty Dick’s Diner have the means to work out the calorie count every time he changes his bacon supplier? Pizza Hut are to ‘encourage customers’ to order ‘healthier options’ – ‘no, not the double crust cheese pizza we’ve been advertising for weeks, have the Iceberg salad with no dressing….’

It all reminded me of a small item I saved from last year – point of sale advertising. Just as you were in danger of getting rumped by George Bush yet again, the Graphic Amor Company bought out a special pack of Obama condoms – printed in full colour with his picture and the promise of ‘seeing you safely through hard times’.

The British Government are world leaders in the art of dishing out free condoms, not only to our own citizens; we litter the world liberally with the products of Mssrs. Durex & Co. £45 million pounds worth donated to Nigeria alone; £22 million pounds worth to Kenya – the statistics make your eyes water – Britain donates more than a 1,000 condoms a minute.

What a wasted advertising opportunity! Admittedly some of the Government’s messages – ‘Have you posted your Tax return?’ for instance, might have a deflating effect; but ‘have you eaten your five a day’ – even ‘R U 16’ could have possibilities.

“Wear your politics with pride, standing up for the Conservatives”.

“I’m a Limp-Dem”

“Vote Brown for the ultimate stimulus package…..”

“Standing up for Balls”

Any more suggestions? I’m off to get me Rubber Mac.

Lie Back and Think of Government. is a post from: Anna Raccoon

We don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do
We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men,
and we’ve got the money too;

The euphemisms are being run up the flag pole, and the international armchair warmongers are gathering round the most popular – the ‘no-fly zone’. Now if a ‘no-fly zone’ actually meant no planes in the air, the entire Libyan question being settled on the basis of ‘knickers an’ vest in the ‘oller’ as several generations of sectarian violence has been in Liverpool, then I might be in favour.

It doesn’t of course; it means none of Gaddafi-currently-on-the-naughty-step’s planes being allowed to take off, by the simple expedient of filling the airways with American war planes, as sold to each and every friendly oil consuming nation that could be persuaded to sign up in time, screaming overhead bombing innocent citizens if they happen to be anywhere near where the co-ordinates say it was ‘earnestly believed’ that three screws that could be used to assemble a nuclear bomb were last seen.

But Gaddafi’s bombing his own people, you say, he must be stopped! Yes, but the only way in which you can ensure his planes don’t take off is by bombing them, bombing the airfields, bombing the air control towers, and bombing all the people who work in them, are anywhere near them, or happen to be anywhere near the one plane – ‘in an operation of this size’ – that happened to veer off course and bomb the local primary school. See? We bomb Gaddafi’s people for him, this is called moral superiority.

From the news clips which I have seen, most of the damage to human life seems to be coming from the tanks of Gaddafi’s elite forces – are we going to bomb them as well? This ‘no-fly zone’ which is so popular is, after all, being suggested because of the loss of Libyan life – is it OK to be felled by a howitzer but not be bombed from the air? Care to experiment to ascertain how you would feel given the choice?

If we bomb the airfields and the planes, what would be our justification for not bombing the tanks? How do we tell the difference between half a dozen tanks racing across the desert full of defecting elite guards en route to donate their weaponry to the rebels, and half a dozen tanks racing to obliterate Benghazi?

If we do nothing, and stop drooling over pictures of photogenic babies with a leg missing on news at ten by way of stoking our jingoism, then what will happen? Innocent citizens will die – as they will if we intervene. One side or the other will end up with the oil – as they will if we intervene. We could just leave the Libyans alone to slug it out together, we could then make a decision as to whether we wish to support the winning side by buying their oil – or not. 80% of Libya’s oil comes into Europe.

Losing 80% of your income is pretty devastating no matter how much of a modern multi-billionaire despot you are.  Losing 80% of your income and waking up to find you have trashed your entire estate – and the servants have all fled – is a crippling result. That is assuming Gaddafi’s forces win! Alternatively, the rebels may win, and Gaddafi will have been dealt with in time honoured way with a length of wire and the nearest lamp post.

Either way, we won’t have added to the carnage, nor will we be financially responsible for rebuilding the country – pace Iraq and Afghanistan – the armchair warmongers may have to turn the central heating down a notch or two, but by the time we had finished paying for the rebuilding of Libya, they would have had to do that anyway.

Drive slower, turn the heating down, bring home the excitable Sky correspondents, it’s not the Superbowl, nor a spectator sport: just give us a calm account of the result in a few weeks time and if we don’t like the look of the winner, we can all play our part by refusing to buy oil.

We don’t have the ships, we don’t have the men, and we certainly don’t have the money to bomb Gaddafi’s citizens for him.

We could usefully have a ban on selling arms to any other country whilst we are about it. Perhaps we wouldn’t feel so guilty watching them turn them on their own citizens then.

Jingo Bells. is a post from: Anna Raccoon

Where were you? Yes You!

In the space of barely a week, Cameron has announced that he is ‘sickened’ by the European Court of Human Rights ruling on the issue of prisoner’s votes, and ‘appalled’ by a subsequent ruling that sex offenders will have the right to appeal against their placement on the sex offenders register.

This has unleashed a wave of anti-EU comment in the media and the Blogosphere. All that pent up anger over the lack of a referendum emerges in comments like ‘our sovereignty usurped by diktats from unelected judges in Strasbourg’.

Listening to some of the more siren voices, anybody would think Britain had been invaded by those plucky Belgians and new laws forced upon us at gunpoint – we weren’t, each and every one of us stood by impotently as this legal miasma become embedded in our national culture.

Of course, by ‘You’, I don’t mean YOU! I mean the fellow next to you. I know YOU will tell me of the articles you have written explaining the ramifications of the Treaty of Rome and subsequent amendments.

I know that YOU, and your Father before you, were out on the streets explaining to your fellow citizens that the original Human Rights law was written by British lawyers, at the behest of British politicians in the wake of World War II. But that fellow beside you, where was he?

I know that YOU, and your Father before you, carefully cross examined every prospective Member of Parliament at election hustings to make sure that he was fully aware that you didn’t expect that Human Rights law to be applied to British citizens, just those nasty Nazi’s, but what about that fellow beside you – was he there?

When Protocol 11 was ratified and a judge from each of the 47 contracting countries was elected to sit in judgement, so unlike our own truly British system of Judges being placed for life on the basis of whispers in the corridors of power, on violations of the Human Rights law – including a British judge, naturally, Sir Nicholas Bratza, who incidentally was in favour of prisoner’s votes, and said so loud and clear; so much for foreign unelected judges forcing their views upon us! – YOU were there, weren’t you, pointing out that this would mean British judges being involved in a system of justice drawn up by British lawyers, that could affect British citizens – although was not then enforceable in a British court of law, so was pretty toothless really. That fellow next to you though, he didn’t seem to be paying attention – looked like he was asleep to me.

Forgetting your Father’s role in all this, I know that YOU will tell me of the demonstrations you organised, the street riots, the viral posts you conjured up, the Twitter storm you created. All the paraphernalia that the world is applauding in Egypt, that forces governments to take notice of the rabble, real live democracy.  When Tony Blair brought all those delectable ‘babes’ into parliament and promised you wonderful things, and British MPs passed British laws which made the toothless judgements of the European Court of Human Rights enforceable in the British courts, YOU were there weren’t you? – but that fellow next to you – he didn’t even bother to vote, couldn’t have given you a single coherent sentence concerning what was happening in Europe, never got beyond the sports page in the Sun, probably voted Labour because his Father did, has no idea what his representative in parliament thought about Europe, couldn’t explain what ‘proportional justice’ meant or whether it was a good idea or not.

Now that the media have got their teeth into the subject and decided that ‘proportional justice’ means that paedophiles and rapists will automatically get the vote, and sex offenders will be abusing your children this time next Tuesday, and you’ll have to take a bag of eggs home, no more half dozens…..and it’s all being forced upon us by unelected foreign judges….YOU know different, don’t’ you? You know that they are elected, that some are British, that the Human Rights laws were written by the British, that the fact that they are enforceable – ‘Prisoners could get 10million in compensation’ – is because British parliamentarians dictated to a British court that this should be so; and that it was sleepy British voters who voted those parliamentarians into power.

YOU’ll have to shout a damn sight louder than you do at present though, because that fellow next to you thinks that its all the fault of some referendum he didn’t get that would be nice and simple for him, Yes or No, and he could have avoided all this, and he’s having a high old time knee jerking in every comments page he can think of that ‘Nobody asked him’.

They did. He just couldn’t be bothered to listen. Too complicated.

The fully paid up members of the Apathy Party. Where were they when their country needed them?

That’s whose fault it is. Not yours.

Your Country Needed You! is a post from: Anna Raccoon

And so it ends, the National Compact first dreamt up in the dying days of the Second World War called the Welfare State.

The Welfare State was always a ponzi scheme of gigantic proportions, that relied on the next round of investors paying out to the first batch of ‘investors’. The only difference between the welfare state and criminal schemes of Charles Ponzi and Bernie Madoff is that you did not have to join their schemes.

With the Welfare State it was and still is compulsory to join, or face the wrath of the state for failing to join a scheme which was bound sooner or later to fail as all ponzi schemes do. Bernie would have loved to have enjoyed that level of compunction.

Lord Warner has ‘advised’ us all that the game is up for the baby boomers and he is calling time on ‘cradle to grave’ welfare state. Yet the political classes will still pretend that they are defending the welfare state and the NHS when they know that the edifice is collapsing around their ears. Ken Clarke is also telling us that the middle classes have no idea the depth of the ‘cuts’ that are going to have to be made. That, Ken, is because the political elite will not dare tell us that it is over for fear of not being elected again.

Rather than treat us as grown ups, and announce the contract between the State and the individual has been broken and the State is defaulting and to start cutting taxes to allow us to make the ‘voluntary’ choice of  with whom we spend our medical insurance money with, they are tinkering with a 1950′s system and proposing that instead of anonymous committees of political placemen/women deciding where they will spend our money, that GP practices are best placed to make these financial decisions.

The one set of people that they will not trust to make these decisions with our own money is us. Given the choice of placing your loved one/yourself in a clean efficient hospital or one run by monolith unions and bureaucracies where there is a distinct possibility of you dying of thirst, being starved or contracting something you did not go in with, what rational choice would you make ?

The Fabian parties of the Big State, the deficit denying Labour Party, the soft left Social Democrats and bizarrely the Cameronian Conservative party will carry on protesting the NHS ‘is safe with them’ and everything in the garden of the welfare state is rosy, when they know that greenfly, death-watch beetle and couch grass have rendered it to the level of a bomb site rather than a ‘Health Service that is the envy of the world’

The State will not accept that it will play a diminished role in our lives in future because they need direct and indirect taxes to go up to fill in the black hole in the nation’s finances. Even now the rate of growth in public spending has only slowed, it is not going down.

The Political Classes have broken the Military compact. Blair, supported by the Labour and Conservative Parties started wars then kept the military short of helicopters and basic equipment. The MOD simply lost control of their finances under Brown. Now some faceless bureaucrat is issuing redundancy notices by email to warrant officers. He/She should be facing the sack. However,  we will never even find out his or her name.

The game is over. Shoot the Sacred Cow before it falls over with Bovine TB, and let us start taking responsibility for our lives, our future and our health.

Andrew

Killing The Sacred Cow is a post from: Anna Raccoon

The Minister for Climate Change, a Canute figure forever muttering ‘Back dastardly warming’ to himself; The Under-Secretary for the Rubber Band Cupboard; The Chief Executive of the National Committee on the Numerical Sequence of Egg Cartons; how many times have you heard a man gloomily refer to himself as ‘the Sous-Chef’ when he has accomplished the magnificent feat of peeling a potato?

I do seriously ask whether men are capable of performing the simplest task without a title of some sort. Bureaucracy. Headed notepaper. Embossed visiting cards. A secretary or two, the full panoply of Man of Status.

Fear not, I am not coming over full blown feminist on you – just querying why the cart must always precede the horse in the male world. Women, in my humble and completely biased opinion – feel free, as ever, to vehemently disagree – tend to perform the action first, and then and only when, they have been joined by dozens of other people, find the need to establish the pecking order, the hierarchy of order taking, the reward system, to be of pressing need to establish.

Arriving at the Libertarian ethos from a Quaker viewpoint, I had understood the entire point of Libertarianism as being self reliance, personal responsibility, individual autonomy and a desire to minimise the actions that the State needed to take on behalf of all of us, rather than an alternative quasi army within which you followed a different set of leaders. Could I really be an anarchist at heart? I had not imagined it could be so, but now I wonder!

I was minded to re-examine these niggling thoughts by the sad spat that has occurred at the Libertarian Alliance. I don’t intend to provide a direct link to the full line of dirty washing, it is not relevant to this discussion – what did catch my eye was that the ‘President’ had resigned. I had thought that only Banana Republics and Warmongering Nations had Presidents, but it seems that given the right circumstances, so do groups of autonomous individuals committed to personal responsibility.

On reflection, I seemed to be living in a glass house and in no position to be throwing stones at this particular oxymoron – the Libertarian Party is not immune to the syndrome, we have both ‘a Leader’ and ‘a Chairman’, and a plethora of National Committees to discuss this and that, the ratio of biscuits to coffee for all I know.

I did enquire why fore? The answer that I got, in respect of the Libertarian Party at least was that they were pushed down this route by the Electoral Commission – who demand to know who your ‘Leader’ is, and separately, who your ‘Chairman’ is, before scooping up your first 500 quid of donations and allowing you to field a ‘Libertarian’ candidate in an election rather than merely support an ‘Independent’ candidate.

It is an answer of sorts, but begs the question – is giving a candidate an official ‘Libertarian’ title the most important support there is? Or put more crudely – is ‘talking the talk’ really more important than ‘walking the walk’? A commentator on the Libertarian Alliance site made the – to me – startling comment:

“Official” institutions are a vital part of a political movement, and blogs and tweets in themselves are only a part of a movement.

Is not the quality of the candidates, the generosity of the pavement plodders giving their time to leaflet, the mass of bloggers who devote hours to lovingly tending blog posts extolling personal responsibility and peeling the dead hand of the state from our throats – and pockets – the true spirit of Libertarianism? An amorphous body of men and women who come together to give what they can, when they can, as they can, rather than an army directed by a miniature version of ‘top-down’ government from on high?

Can politics never be any more than a confrontational army, clustered round a ‘Flag’, obeying orders from on high, with an established chain of command, duly covered with prescribed dollops of ‘scrambled egg’?

Aristotle believed that the end goal of politics was to make citizens good and disposed to perform noble actions, had Aristotle been better disposed towards the equality of women he might have allowed a feminine viewpoint to enter that statement and then it could have read that the end goal of politics should be to trust citizens to be good and disposed to perform noble actions. Women, after all, have had thousands of years experience in the art of ‘letting go’ when the child has grown up.

I have been truly heartened by the times readers of this blog have come together to help some unfortunate soul currently in difficulties. No bureaucracy, no list of donors published, no titles awarded, no rewards given or asked, just decent human nature doing what it can, when it can, as it can. Job done, each and every time – and na’er a sign of a ‘National Committee’ or any of the other accoutrements of the political ‘Wheeltappers and Shunters Club’.

Am I misunderstanding the male psyche, missing the point entirely perhaps, a frustrated feminist – or even a closet Anarchist in my dotage?

The ‘Scrambled Egg’ Brigade. is a post from: Anna Raccoon

Harry Shindler is tough. Decanted onto the beaches of Anzio by a grateful British Government in 1944, he successfully dodged bullets – and landed a few in the right places – as he fought his way up the peninsula with the British Eighth Army. He was young, fit, and a hero. That was then.

Today he is wizened, greyed and balding; a man you wouldn’t give a second thought to if you passed him shuffling down the street to collect his pension. Except that you wouldn’t pass him in the street, for Harry has evaded the muggers by collecting his pension by post. From Italy. The country he fought to liberate.

That may not seem much of a crime to you – but to the British Government it is the ultimate insult and must be duly punished.

David Cameron said a few weeks ago that the idea of giving prisoners the vote made him feel ‘physically sick’ – at least he is considering the notion, albeit forced on him by the European Court on Human Rights.

Rapists, terrorists, the dregs of society, however sick Mr Cameron feels, he is considering that they should be part of society, given a voice in how their non-taxation should be represented.

However, Harry Shindler is neither a rapist, nor a terrorist, and certainly not the ‘dregs of society’. He is a tax payer, but Cameron is not even considering whether he should have representation.

Harry is an honest man. Unlike the thousands of Pakistani’s who have returned to Maipur and now cheerfully hand their postal votes over to Asian clan leaders who control the voting in Labour dominated inner city wards and set up ‘voting factories’ to process the ballot papers, Harry told the truth when he decided to stay in Italy. He told the returning officer that he was unlikely to return.

After all, how many retirees do move from their retirement home? He was unlikely to return to England and collect his cold weather payments, or his pension credits, or be a burden on the NHS. He would still be paying the UK Government his full taxation on his British pension.

For that heinous crime, Harry was deprived of his vote. Disenfranchised.

There are many misconceptions regarding those who live abroad. Gerald Kaufman, the Labour spokesman on home affairs in 2000, argued that only those resident in their constituency should be allowed to vote. His battle-cry was “no representation without taxation”. Expatriates, in Mr Kaufman’s eyes, were tax exiles who have forfeited their right to choose a government which sets the taxes for those left behind. Kaufman was smartly silenced when Labour realised the potential of postal votes for those resident in Bangladesh and Maipur.

The notion that all expatriates are wealthy is further seen in the fact that it is only the EU which forced the UK to give annual pension increases to pensioners living in Europe – in all other parts of the world, pensions are frozen at the rate extant on the day you leave to follow your heart or your partner to foreign climes.

The issue of ‘cold weather payments’ has exercised many expatriates. Those living in Spain were described as ‘raking in millions of pounds’ for having ‘escaped the chilly UK and retired to the sun’. Nonsense. Those clear blue skies come with a price – no cloud cover to protect you from the extremes of cold weather. Our winter night temperatures regularly drop to minus 10 – we don’t even discuss the weather until it drops below those temperatures! Minus ten is the exception in Britain. “Price hikes in the UK mean that pensioners’ gas and electricity bills have rocketed in recent months, leaving many elderly people frightened they will not be able to heat their homes this winter.” – Not as frightened as those pensioners living in Europe who do not get cold weather allowance, and are not eligible for any assistance from their host country – they are battling with pensions slashed by the exchange rate and threatened with increased taxation to bail out a country that they no longer have a say in the management of. There are an estimated 5.5-6 million Britons living abroad, or about ten per cent of the population. A mere 50,000 of them have their rights to cold weather payments preserved by virtue of having claimed the benefit whilst still in the UK.

Still, back to honest Harry. He is still a valiant warrior, he decided that if prisoner’s could have their right to vote restored by the European Court – then so could he.

“If people who have broken the law, are in jail – and in my book broken their ties with society more than people who live abroad – can be given the vote then why can’t we? A war was fought to bring back to Europe the right to vote for its people, yet thousands of British citizens are denied that basic right. The only excuse given in a letter from a British Government Minister was that we have ‘broken our tie’ with the UK.”

Surely it is the UK government which has broken its tie with us? The UK government that was so keen that we should have ‘free movement’ all over Europe. We moved – and they promptly punished us.

Harry took his case to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which accepted the suit in June 2009 with the almost biblical subject line “Shindler v. the United Kingdom”. In an earlier moment of his life Harry was the secretary of a small trades union that challenged Britain’s biggest union, the Transport and General Workers Union, in a case involving union recognition and won, so taking on the UK is only a small step up.

It has taken four years to get to the point where the Court is ‘almost’ ready to deliver its judgement. We wait with bated breath. Harry is now 90 years old.

Old warriors never die – and Harry has no plans to fade either.

Go Harry!

Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George! is a post from: Anna Raccoon

One of the sops offered to Sinn Féin as part of the ‘peace process’ by which they agreed to stop bombing innocent citizens as they went about their business was to agree that Gerry Adams could claim expenses for ‘representing the people of West Belfast’ whilst not actually taking up his seat in Parliament.

Adams has now written to Speaker Bercow telling him that he no longer wishes to do that.

Guido is of the opinion that Speaker Bercow has ‘altered the British constitution forever’ by accepting Adams’ resignation by letter and not through the usual route of taking up a paid Crown position. Michael Crick appears to agree with him.

I’m sure Bercow would be flattered to think that he had done so – but I disagree. The British Constitution was altered forever by the decision of Speaker Boothroyd, who barred the two MPs from taking their seat until they had sworn an Oath of allegiance to the Crown – leaving him in the position of only ‘technically’ being an MP.

Gerry Adams has never been paid as an MP – the £500,000 that he and his fellow MPs were famously exposed by the Telegraph as having received from British Taxpayers were wholly expenses. Adams has never sworn the allegiance to the Crown that would allow him to take his seat in parliament, and thus never been paid a salary as an Honourable Member of Parliament.

His position has always been that of a ‘representative’ of his West Belfast constituents, a position for which he received expenses.

Erskine May, the parliamentary bible is quite explicit:

“It is a settled principle of parliamentary law that a Member, after he is duly chosen, cannot relinquish his seat; and, in order to evade this restriction, a Member who wishes to retire accepts office under the Crown, which legally vacates his seat and obliges the House to order a new writ.”

Erskine May never envisaged the situation whereby a person might be chosen to take up the honour of a seat in the House of Commons, then declined to do so.

Adams, whilst ‘duly chosen’, never took up the seat in parliament that being ‘duly chosen’ entitled him to – all he has done with his letter of resignation is to forgo the expenses he was allowed to claim.

Had Speaker Bercow forced him to take the position of Manor of Northstead (not Bailiff of the Chiltern Hundreds, dear Iris Robinson is still hanging onto to that revered position!) he would have been according him a status that he was not entitled to.

We should be cheering, not jeering; no longer is the British Taxpayer forced to subsidise Adams’ expensive London apartment – though he may be entitled to a final £41,000 to cover the cost of ‘winding down’ his Belfast constituency office.

Cheering, Not Jeering. is a post from: Anna Raccoon

Race – Sex – Religion.

Three powerful forces in society. Which ones trumps the other?

Race encompasses ethnicity so you can be racist to French people by calling them Frogs even if both of you are blonde blue eyed Aryans. You can also be labelled racist even if the “victim” doesn’t perceive it as such but any other person does. Sex is the differentiation based on gender and gender identify and also includes sexual preferences. Religion is that which you have faith in, be it a supreme being, a god, or nature, or non at all.

According the recent ruling where it is discriminatory to forbid a homosexual couple from staying in a B&B even its against your personal beliefs the rights of sex overrides the rights of religion. It has now become legal for homosexuals to go to a Muslim business and demand compensation if they are refused service. It could also be technically illegal for a B&B to refuse service to an S&M loving couple. Because S&M is just as much a sexual orientation as homosexuality is according to some people.

Or was the ruling made on which group is the lesser minority. In other words because gays are a smaller minority than Christians, gays can’t be discriminated against by Christians. But then Gays can be discriminated against by Humanists.

The judge mentioned that it is a sign that society has changed that discrimination against homosexuality is now seen as taboo. But it also shows that society is less inclined to religion than ever before, even though a large proportion of the UK state that their religion is CoE in the last census.

Statists want everyone to have all rights possible and to have the state impose them and force them on everyone, but then they don’t usually think it through. Should we have any rights other than life? What happens when a conflict between two rights occurs? Which trumps the other? Should the state impose any rights through laws? How big an issue does it need to be before friendly banter is perceived as racism.

Now we don’t want discrimination based on someone’s beliefs, sex, or colour as a good society is one where everyone is fair to everyone else but neither do we want one group to claim top trumps over another group through rights. So how do we stop discrimination without using rights roulette?

Some examples that might help the discussion.

Is it discrimination to exclude a boy from a game of football if he is crap at playing? Is it still discrimination if the boy is black as well?

Is it discrimination to not serve a black customer in a village in northern Scotland where they don’t have much choice about where they can take their business? Is it the same discrimination in deepest London where a black person can just go to the next corner and conduct their business?

Is it discrimination to stop a Scientologist from entering a Mosque? What about stopping a homosexual from entering the Mosque. Can a Muslim be stopped from entering a sex club?

Is it discrimination for a black kid to make fun of a red haired kid?

Can we not just accept that people are different and have different viewpoints, ideas, and ways of living and that unless they are committing an act of violence against us that only best way of fighting discrimination is through education and that many times the discrimintion is only perceived and does not actually exist and that groups can still live harmoniously even when they have different beliefs. In the case of homosexuality the education has used the fact that its not so much a choice as a determination by genes and hormones and brain chemistry. Race has highlighted that there are more differences within a genetic grouping (such as northern Europeans) than there is between blacks and whites. With religion it is educating others that all faiths are equal as no one faith is better than the others, no matter what the fundamentalists think.

And don’t get me started on politics!

SBML

Rights roulette is a post from: Anna Raccoon

On Saturday Ed Miliband gave a speech at a conference organised by the Fabian Society, by doing so he is endorsing an organisation that is the closest I can equate to an unethical, amoral resident evil still in our midst from a period of of our history that we should not be proud of, let alone influence the thought processes of any putative future prime minister.

The Fabian Society founded in 1884 was named after Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus Cunctator (ca. 280 BC – 203 BC) a Roman Dictator who defended Rome in the Punic Wars. Verrucosus being descriptive means the ‘warty’, Cunctator the Delayer. It is from the latter nickname that the Fabians took their tactics of gradually wearing down of capitalism with a view to to its eventual destruction.  As Quintus once advocated defeating the Carthaginian Army.

At the centre of this Society were a civil servant and his wife Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Members have included George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Annie Besant, Graham Wallas, Hubert Bland, Edith Nesbit, Sydney Olivier, Oliver Lodge, Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf, Ramsay MacDonald and Emmeline Pankhurst, Oswald Moseley, Clement Attlee, Anthony Crosland, Richard Crossman, Tony Benn, Harold Wilson, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

These ‘intellectuals’ regarded the working classes as something akin to to livestock than individuals. Their stated aim was-

“the breeding of even a moderately Imperial race” which would be more productive and better militarily than the “stunted, anaemic, demoralised denizens…of our great cities”; and a national education system because “it is in the classrooms…that the future battles of the Empire for commercial prosperity are already being lost”

George Bernard Shaw speaking of the coming Socialist Utopia

“Under Socialism, you would not be allowed to be poor. You would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you liked it or not. If it were discovered that you had not the character and industry enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner; but whilst you were permitted to live, you would have to live well.”

The breeding aspect reveals their obsessive interest in eugenics which reached its apogee with the extermination camps across eastern Europe to deal with the ‘unfit’, the jews, gypsies and homosexuals. The unfit also included Downs Syndrome, epileptics and alcoholics; these were to be reduced by methods ranging from compulsory sterilisation or euthansia. The far left party NSDAP (The National Socialist German Workers Party) known to history as the Nazi party lead by another dictator Adolf Hitler, who, like Moseley and Mussolini, was attracted to extreme left wing politics after the first world war.

The enemy of both the Fabians and these National Socialist movements was individual Liberalism. It still is.

The common thread in all of these is that there should be an elite that knows ‘the best’ for the the lumpen masses who can be shovelled into grotesque high rise accomodation and are simply there as producers. It is in the interest of the elite that the masses are kept ignorant and largely servile.

The Liberal Democracies made a supreme effort defeating National Socialism by 1945, however this was at the expense of allowing Socialism to be part of the National Government during the war. The result was welfarism and dependency on a massive scale post war. The Liberal Democracies continue to hold the line against Soviet Russia throughout the Cold War

However the Webbs were disillusioned with the lack of progress by the Labour Party  in Britain,  having visited the Soviet Union in 1932. They published a book, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? (1935) based on their experiences there, which indicated a shift from their expectation of a natural progress of social and political reform. Although they expressed concern about the lack of political freedom in the country, they were highly impressed with the improvement in the health and educational services, as well as the political and economic equality of women. They believed that the Soviet type of planned economy would eventually spread around the world. The Webbs’ final book, The Truth about Soviet Russia, published in 1942, continued to support the Soviet Union, celebrating central planning.

In 1942, Stuart Chase, in his book “The Road We Are Traveling” spelled out the system of planning the Fabians had in mind; the interesting thing is to look at that plan in comparison to Britain and the EU.

1. Strong, centralized government.

2. Powerful Executive at the expense of  Parliament and the Judiciary.

3. Government controlled banking, credit and securities exchange.

4. Government control over employment.

5. Government control over unemployment insurance, old age pensions.

6. Universal medical care, food and housing programs.

7. Access to unlimited government borrowing.

8. A managed monetary system.

9. Government control over foreign trade.

10. Government control over natural energy sources, transportation and agricultural production.

11. Government regulation of labour.

12. Youth camps devoted to health discipline, community service and ideological teaching consistent with those of the authorities.

13. Heavy progressive taxation.

The fall of communism in 1989 did not bring about the triumph of Liberalism, conversely it saw the rapid expansion of communitarianism in the West.

The old Liberal Party in Britain succumbed to an inverse take over by the Social Democrat Party, The Conservative Party swung to the ‘Big Society’ under Cameron , and the United States fell to Obama’s Democrats. The European Union also swept all before it.

If you want to know why you now live under a ‘Nanny’ or Communitarian State, you need to be aware of the history of Fabianism and why Ed Miliband chose this venerable institution of intellectual fraudsters to make his first major speech to his supporters, and please note the reference to the ‘long’ road back to power and his appeals to the Liberal Democrats. Classic Fabianism.

He calls this alliance the ‘Progressive’ forces. I just see a history of repression, corruption, war and death camps. The road to Hell being paved with good intentions.

I am a Libertarian, because I do not accept my relationship between the individual and the state, as that of servant and master.

There is no need to accept Fabianism and Communitarianism as inevitable, I would refer you to alternative ‘think tanks’ as to a more honest and peaceful future.

The Cobden Centre

Peace will come to earth when the people have more to do with each other and governments less.

Richard Cobden

and the Adam Smith Institute, unless the true Liberals seek Constitutional change on the basis of a Swiss style constitution and a referenda on the European Union as so constituted, we are going to be damned to a Fabian future.

Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus – Dictator Then, Dictator Now is a post from: Anna Raccoon

Today’s guest poster is Mik Robertson on how the requirement for a £500 deposit and ten signatures is positively open compare to the United States

The United States is often touted as a shining example of how representative government and a democratic electoral process should work, particularly by those who govern there. A closer look does reveal some significant problems, though.

As chairman of the Libertarian Party of Pennsylvania, I have encountered some serious barriers to participation in the electoral process that affect not only our candidates, and any candidate who is not associated with one of the two big political parties, but the democratic process itself. Ultimately the voters lose out by not having choices on the ballot, and political discourse becomes severely limited.

The elections laws in Pennsylvania have some unique features that make being a candidate in the commonwealth more difficult than elsewhere, but there are also problems found in many other states. This look at a couple issues may show how even an apparently well-functioning democratic system can be manipulated and controlled.

First of all, Pennsylvania has a particularly stringent requirement to be considered a political party. At least 15% of all registered voters must register with the party to count. If places like Massachusetts had this requirement, the Republican Party would not be considered a political party, and if places like Utah had this requirement, the Democratic Party would not be considered one. Those two are the only recognized political parties in Pennsylvania.

Further, Pennsylvania has what is called a closed primary election, where only those voters registered with a recognized political party can participate, and only with their registered party.  This is a publicly-funded nomination process for two political parties.

Candidates who go through the primary election are required to file valid signatures of registered voters in order for their names to appear on the nomination ballot. The number of signatures required may vary from ten for a municipal office to several hundred for a district state legislative, one thousand congressional office up to two thousand for a statewide office like Governor or US Senator. Once nominated, those candidates are automatically placed on the November election ballot.

The Libertarian Party, considered a political body in Pennsylvania, nominates its candidates at its own expense. Additional signatures are required for these nominees, and any other alternative candidate, in order to appear on the November election ballot. At least 2% of the highest vote-getter in that district from the previous election is required, with the minimum number being that for the same office on the primary election nomination ballot.

For local offices, this means our nominees often have to collect 50% to 100% more signatures than a candidate on the primary ballot. For district races our nominees usually need three to five times as many signatures, and for statewide office ten to over thirty times the number of signatures can be required.  Generally, an alternative candidate for statewide office in Pennsylvania would need around 25,000 to 30,000 signatures to appear on the election ballot, but in 2006 that number was over 67,000 signatures.

Once submitted, signatures are then subject to a challenge process whereby they undergo a strict technical review if an objection is raised. Signers are required to complete their printed name, signature, address and date all in their own hand. If any information was determined to be written by another, the signature will be disqualified. If any information is determined to be illegible, the signature will be disqualified. If the signer uses a nickname (like Joe if the voter registration was signed Joseph) the signature will be disqualified, as it will be if they put the month and day for the date but not the year, or if they have moved and have not updated their voter registration address.

If the candidate fails to demonstrate that enough valid signatures remain to be placed on the ballot, that candidate can be assessed the costs to conduct the review of the signatures. Ralph Nader in 2004 and Carl Romanelli in 2006 were each assessed in excess of $80,000 in fees after being removed from the ballot in Pennsylvania.

The extra burden placed on alternative candidates and the assessment of fees if those candidates fail to withstand a challenge has a chilling effect on the democratic process. Restrictive and unfair ballot access laws result not only in limited choices for voters, but when coupled with gerrymandered election districts and campaign finance laws, in a closed political system that can be dominated and controlled by two political machines with largely the same interests.

Alternative ideas are then no longer included in the electoral discussions, and partisan vitriol replaces reason as the two parties try to show there are some significant differences between them from which people can choose. We can see this now developing in the US.  In the end, the illusion of a democratic process is all that will remain.

© Michael J “Mik” Robertson

Chairman Pennsylvania Libertarian Party

And You Think We Have Problems is a post from: Anna Raccoon

It wasn’t Howard Flight’s ‘first’ acknowledged gaffe – that was his statement in 2005 that an incoming Conservative government would make deeper cuts than those publicly announced. Michael Howard removed him as a Conservative candidate for that transgression.

His latest alleged ‘gaffe’ was to say that:

“We’re going to have a system where the middle classes are discouraged from breeding because it’s jolly expensive, but for those on benefit there is every incentive”.

Labour howled with outrage, the cry of ‘Eugenics’ went up, even the trade Unions became involved with TUC secretary Brendan Barber branding Flight “an insensitive throwback to the worst of 1980s politics”.

It was that word ‘throwback’ that made me sit up and take notice – for I happened at the time to be reading some background material on the original Mental Incapacity Bill – circa 1912. Regular readers will know of my obsession with the current Mental Capacity Act, and understand that I consider this sort of reading to be recreational!

If you want to know about eugenics, then I recommend ploughing your way through the Hansard record of the debates leading up to that Bill – in particular the ‘Feeble Minded Person’s Control Bill’ – you will need a strong stomach.

You see the unpalatable truth is that Flight’s comments on ‘breeding’ were a throwback – but not to Tory policies, but to early Labour policies and politicians whose language would make you wince:

There is only one fitting description; they are almost like human vermin. They crawl about, doing absolutely nothing, except polluting and corrupting everything they touch. We talk about the liberty of the subject. What nonsense! What waste of words! We ask that you should take these people and have proper control over them, because they have no control over themselves. They are verminous, dirty, with no idea of washing or cleansing themselves. Yet they are human beings, and you could, under proper control, so far improve them that they could be put to some employment, not enough to keep them—I never expect that—but sufficient to maintain themselves partly, and to give them a human existence which they have not got now. Above everything else, you would stop the supply of these children—a very important thing.

Yes, indeed – that was the Labour member for Woolwich Arsenal constituency railing against the Conservative member Gershom Stewart’s proposals for what we would now call the ‘underclass’. Labour were incensed at the idea of the feckless poor and ‘feeble minded’ being allowed to breed in uncontrolled fashion and wished them firmly locked away along with other ‘undesirable breeders’, such as homosexuals and criminals – one and the same thing in those days.

The Mental Incapacity Act was passed and used to lock up and prevent further ‘breeding’ by unmarried Mothers – the definition of incapacity was as loose then as it is today. It is the last Labour government which rewrote the Mental Capacity Act 2005 to allow women to be forcibly sterilised if so required under the additional provisions they gave the Court of Protection to dictate ‘welfare requirements and medical treatment’.

Beveridge, the apparently revered Father of the Welfare State, wanted to suffer the unemployed:

“With complete and permanent loss of all citizen rights — including not only the franchise but civil freedom and fatherhood”.

It is not the ‘nasty Tory Party’ that is being associated with Eugenics through Flight’s words, rather it is the Tory Party not wishing to be associated with the eugenical and disdainful attitude of the Labour Party towards the ‘feckless underclass’ that caused Cameron to disassociate himself from Flight’s words.

That does not distract, however, from the plain fact that flight’s words were actually true. We have two sources. The impeccably independent Institute for Fiscal Studies which concludes that:

The probability of having a birth increased by 1.3 percentage points among the low education group, equivalent to a 15 per cent increase. This equates to nearly 45,000 additional births.

And (hat tip to Burning Our Money):

Who published this graph showing the correlation between areas of high benefit dependency and higher than average births to unmarried Mothers.

So – Flight spoke the truth, but the reality was that Cameron didn’t want to be associated with any suggestion of a connection between his party members and Labour’s belief in the Eugenics movement.

Fascinating.

From Flight to Reality. is a post from: Anna Raccoon

Indeed it can! Pearse Doherty, Gerry Adams’ ‘made man’, otherwise known as the Sinn Féin candidate in the Donegal South West By-election is leading by a stunning majority.

Gerry Adams and Martin McGuiness were this afternoon watching the count closely at the Finn Valley Centre in Stranolar, which must have cheered the counters no end as they commenced their second count.

Sinn Féin’s share of the vote was increased by 10% in the first 30 boxes to be counted.

Just the very thing to restore confidence in the Irish banking system – the political wing of the IRA cutting the government’s Dáil majority to just two votes….

Sinn Féin’s Pearse Doherty has said it was clear already that the platform and policies put forward by Fianna Fáil have now been rejected.

Mr Doherty said the message for An Taoiseach Brian Cowen from the people of Donegal South West was ‘get out of office’.

Since that message was delivered by the political wing of the IRA…

The counters are now settling down to a third recount, the quota of 17,213 has still not been exceeded. Pearse Doherty now has 13,736 votes.

The Donegal area has a significant number of native Irish speakers and is close to the Louth area in which Gerry Adams canvassed alongside his suspected paedophile brother Liam Adams. Sinn Féin claims that Liam Adams played a short, minor role in the party are strongly challenged by many republicans.

One said: “Liam was active in Sinn Féin in Dundalk for at least seven years. He was synonymous with the party’s name here. He was seen as an asset to Sinn Féin and the community.

A delightful bunch.

Can life get any worse for the Irish? is a post from: Anna Raccoon

Was not to cull the BBC on day two of the new government.

Sean Gabb of the Libertarian Alliance said as much in a speech a few years ago:

“Have no doubt that we are engaged in a cultural battle for the soul of Britain. Failure to defeat the ‘last bastion of  Fabianism’ will lead to the return of  a Labour lead Government within three years, most probably propped up by the former Social and Liberal Democrats.”

In my opinion they should have dropped the ‘Liberal’ not the ‘Social’ word, as they are an avowedly interventionist, Fabian Social Democratic Party.

If you thought the Brown/Blair years were bad for Civil Liberties, the much further left leaning Ed Milliband Labour Party, backed by UNITE will be far worse. The Stalinist Balls will be offered a significant role, possibly Chancellor, and we will see a State directed siege economy favouring the Nationalisation of the remaining two major High Street Banks not under State ownership, Barclays and HSBC, and the public sector and large corporations being the major employers. The Kulaks of the private sector will be forced to the wall, or reduced to servants of the public sector.

In Cultural Revolution, Culture War – Hampden 2003 now in reprint, Gabb shows how the Conservatives lost Britain:

An Anglican Bishop nearly arrested for stating Church doctrine. Villagers actually arrested for making fun of gypsies. Museums stripped of “imperialist” symbols. This is life in the England of today. “Political correctness gone mad” some will say.

Not so, says Sean Gabb. In this book, he explains how England in particular, and the English-speaking world in general, have been conquered from within. We face a new ruling class made up of the student radicals of the 1960s and 70s. Now in power, they are creating in their own behaviour all the corruption and bigotry and hypocrisy that they falsely alleged against the liberal democratic rulers they have replaced.

This being so, the leading writers of the “New Left” Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, and Michel Foucault become highly relevant for conservatives and libertarians. They are relevant not because their analysis of liberal democracy was correct, but because it explains what their disciples are trying to do. Before we can change the world, we need to understand it. This book helps towards that understanding, and suggests what needs to be done to give England back to its people.

This is a largely rewritten and much expanded version of a book first brought out in 2003. It went through five reprints, and is now rewritten by popular demand.

I was a mature student of twenty six when I was first exposed to the Italian Marxist Gramsci, and Althusser by over excited messianic left leaning university lecturers. It has formed the basis of our cultural life in this country in the intervening quarter century, much in the way that the French left bank Agrarian Socialists influenced Pol Pot in Cambodia in the seventies.

The idea being that the ‘people’ were truly happy and contented living as pre capitalist peasants. The result being that millions died. Notice how National Socialism and Communist Socialism and the recent agrarian Socialism always ends up with a mass body count?

Therefore Culture Wars do count, and the left has been hugely successful in winning these cultural wars.

Back to the BBC.  In the aftermath of the Kelly affair the BBC got rid of its Chairman and CEO in a coup organised by Alistair Campbell, since then it has been the obedient mouthpiece of Fabianism.

Despite a state of near national bankruptcy and political corruption, the nightly fare of the BBC at both national and local level has been the ‘ devastating cuts’ and the special pleading of essential public services.

Last night, for regional viewers in the West, it was the RSPB  (I thought they were a Charity, not a quango). They were saying that if Government subsidies were not maintained, all the birds in this or that particular marshland habitat would perish and die.

The Insolvency Service has promised Vince Cable an 11% cut in costs but no redundancies !! So the default position is that it has been run in an incompetent manner for the last ten years if they can come up with 11% cuts overnight. Most private business have already cut costs to the bone and have had to make redundancies.

Government spending is always justified by saying it is protecting us; it is not, it is a vast job creation scheme.

Dave – there is no point going to India promoting Britain, when the bulk of our population is now working for the State in some form or other. You cannot export paper pushing and call centres, the Indians do this far cheaper than we do.

I suspect that most of the captains of industry on this trip will be thinking ‘ Blimey we need to export more of our back office staff functions out here’.

It baffles me why the British Taxpayer is still giving financial aid to India, a country with its own space program and nuclear weapons.

Dave, you are not a businessman, just stop it and come home and start fighting the Culture Wars. The Left has lost the election, but is fighting a rear guard action every night on our TV screens.

The State is currently only slowing down its rate of growth, not cutting back despite the nightly broadcasts by the Gramsci BBC, propounding cultural hegemony that the cuts are ‘devastating ‘ for essential services.

The ConDem may have lost the battle before it started. Why ? because Dave was a policy free zone from day one.

Friends of Libertarianism have literally months to start turning the tide, before the ‘endarkening’ of Fabianism becomes ‘Millibandism’  a welding of trade union money, and Hampstead Millionaire Socialism.

Deal with the BBC now because in a year it will be far too late to break up this expensive monolith.

The ConDem’s greatest mistake so far. is a post from: Anna Raccoon

I see the politics of prison are back in the news again.

As a fairly strict libertarian, I am faced with the apparent conundrum of having to support some agency, whether it be the state or some other agency depriving someone of their liberty. But the reality of it is that there is no conundrum at all: if Person A does Person B some harm, then they need to be punished. This could be harm to their person, their possessions , their reputation. The punishments for these should vary on the nature of the harm done, but for certain severe crimes it is quite reasonable to lock someone up for an extended period. For particularly severe crimes, taking someone out of society forever is an entirely reasonable sanction. I would draw the line at the death penalty, because it is possible for people to be wrongfully found guilty and freed — it’s very difficult to reverse a death sentence!

The real debate here is not about the need for prison, but the issue of recidivism: what happens with people who repeat criminal activity. Many “bleeding hearts” and wringers of hands will claim that sending anyone to prison merely encourages them to follow a life of crime. There is much talk of “rehabilitation”, but really, this is a nonsense. We live in a society full to the brim with opportunities to learn useful skills, there is little need for prisoners to be “rehabilitated” through any special program.

It is true that most people will have a reluctance to employ a former jailbird, but that is part of the natural ostracisation that comes about when you transgress. It is surely up to the former criminal to redouble their efforts to find a way to prove their worth and earn the right to come back into society. And many do.

These people are “good news” and as such, are not newsworthy and enjoy no headlines in the papers. It may well be that some “rehabilitation” programs have benefit, but for the most part, people are either inclined to criminality or they are not. It is extremely rare in the UK that a first offence will get you jail time, so the chances are that if you have been to jail, you are predisposed to criminal activity and have had lesser punishments applied to no avail, or your first offence was particularly severe.

The pure and principled Libertarian position is that each offence should really be treated separately, the idea being that if you have done your time, society should consider you punished and the slate should be wiped clean.

But I’m not sure that this principle takes cognisance of human nature. Studies have shown that crimes against property, such as theft and robbery have extraordinarily high rates of recidivism, in some cases as high as 80%. In other words, once someone has started on a path of property crime, they don’t stop. And it is at this point where my stance on jail time and that of pure libertarianism diverge: I fully support the idea of a “three strikes and you’re out” policy. I also firmly believe that a previous history of proven criminal behaviour should be considered when sentencing. Anybody can make a mistake once or even twice, but there comes a time when you have to accept that someone is not interested in going straight.

The Home Office estimates that half of our crime is caused by a hard core of 100,000 repeat offenders. By simply doubling the number of prison places:

• these people can be removed from society either permanently or for a very, very long time
• we will have ample place to punish people who commit serious crimes but aren’t recidivist and
• ensure that prisoners cannot justify any demands for early release on the grounds that “overcrowded prisons infringe their human rights, innit?”

The Tories may be winning plaudits from social libertarians for their soft touch policies, but the truth of it is that MPs will rarely, if ever, be on the receiving end of the tender ministrations of regular criminals and this is just an exercise in meeting budget targets with no likely consequences for Ken Clarke and his fellow members of the ruling class. The cost of building a mass of new prisons and running them is much lower than what crime costs us all.

If the government was serious about improving life for us and slashing the £40,000,000,000 that crime costs us all every year, they’d focus their efforts on doing the things they should do and not the things that make them look good in the Guardian.

Do not pass “begin” is a post from: Anna Raccoon