Where's Gordon?

It looks like becoming what The Scotsman is now calling Gordon Brown's "Spring of Discontent", and the strikes and the latest sleaze scandals look to have produced the classic reaction from Macavity. "I wasn't there" Brown has vanished again. Where is he? Safely tucked up in the bunker, I would think, furiously scribbling apparently disconnected notes in his thick, black, felt-tip pen, but which have, in fact, one, recurring theme: how can he screw up the country even more. We know this how? Because it's happened before, several times.

We've always known that he really is bloody hopeless, and clearly a bit of a depressive as well - that's what all the hiding is about - but what's becoming crystal clear also is how powerless he's become. His is an empty shell of a premiership, hollowed out by coup attempts from the sensible-ish right of his party and now held to ransom by the militant tendency of the loony left.

So what's he done? Disappeared, just like he always does when the pressure really is on.

Well, you can't hide forever, Gordon. You'll have to face us sooner or later. It's the law.

The Battle For Labour

The resurgent confidence of the militant tendency among the leadership of Labour's giant union financial backers is a clear sign that a vicious civil war has started in the Labour movement. Charles Moore's article for Saturday's Telegraph on this disturbing development, in which he provides bullet proof evidence that the far left, who long ago infiltrated and took control of the unions, are planning to seize power, is dynamite. He says, for instance:

Unite is led by Tony Woodley. From today, he is pitting his union against hundreds of thousands of holidaymakers in a strike designed to break the will of British Airways, which could go bust. And yesterday Unite's traditional allies in the rail union RMT promised an Easter strike of signal workers.

Mr Woodley is backed by the faction in his union called United Left, which declares that it wants "a socialist economic, social and political system", and wishes to "regain" the Labour Party. It has a motion down for the union's policy conference after the election that calls for the union to "give no support" to any Labour MPs who do not seek to abolish the "anti-trade union laws". This threat could be powerful: Labour campaigns in 148 constituencies are funded by Unite, and 167 Labour MPs and candidates are members of the union. Unite produces a quarter of Labour's money.

This is just a taste. The rest of the article is so powerful, I would hazard it could turn the election. That is if, as Moore says, Cameron starts to move with a bit more political athleticism in taking advantage of it. The stakes are so high, it's difficult to frame them. We are now faced with the real possibility, if Cameron gets it badly wrong (and he would have to get it very badly wrong, admittedly), not just of five more years of Gordon Brown (hideous though that thought is) but of a hard left Labour regime in Westminster.

Whatever the speculation about policy and the intricacies of poll variations, one thing is now clear: the real fight, the fight for the nation's soul, has now begun. And it's a fight we, and the Conservative Party, have to win. Or we all lose.

Climate Ripper

I'm quite proud that my (sadly curtailed) rip of this performance by the great man, Lord Monckton, in Australia a month or so ago has now been watched by nearly 6000 people and commented on by just shy of 100 (including me).



This particular thought disease, 'Man Made Climate Change' or whatever the dangerous zealots are peddling it as now, is an especially vicious example of something we humans experience from time to time, thanks to our insatiable small-mindedness and eternal stupidity. But thanks to the apparent re-emergence, if not resurgence, of collective rational thought since Climategate, this latest example of the scale of the capacity of humans for superstitious folly is definitely on its last legs.

I think we're finally beginning to move on, socially and scientifically. And that's a very good thing, because when this ugly lunacy has been defeated, we can once again begin to focus on genuine environmental issues (the things I was brought up to care about), like saving the rainforests, saving endangered species and, ultimately, saving ourselves from watermelon, AGW, misanthropic lunatics who seem to prefer mass landscape vandalism over genuine environmentalism. They're basically Marxists masquerading as concerned citizens. We stopped that before; we'll stop it again.

But given how deep they've managed to penetrate our society, however, we're going to need not just better science, but a hell of a lot of luck if we are ever even to hope to cure our society of their corrosive, possibly deadly, disease.

I think we'll get that luck. We did in the past, and we will in the future. Maybe luck has something to do with being right - and determined!

Monckton's Australian Mission

Just watching now a tiresomely biased BBC report on Monckton's mission to save Australia from the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on humanity, namely anthropogenic global warming (or 'man made climate change', as it's conveniently been redefined nowadays by the desperate pseudo-scientists pushing this horse manure. Not 'woman made' climate change, though, strangely).

Two things struck me about it, however, both of which actually provide some cause for hope in the titanic battle against this watermelon, millennial, misanthropist thought disease. The first is that Monckton has finally made it on to the supine, notoriously and unquestioningly warmist BBC in the first place. The second is that it's pretty clear now that Monckton's mission Down Under might have actually turned at least one major nation's population to the Good Side.

As Christopher Booker pointed out today, there's a hell of a long way to go before the world is rid of this massive, co-ordinated corruption (and the parasitic Trotskyists, with this, their perfect 'end of the world as we know it' Trojan Horse narrative, could yet prevail), but Monckton, thanks to his now-legendary zeal, wisdom and logic, might finally have at least won the first battle in what has become nothing less than an all out war for truth, good science and humanity.

We are in a very bad way, especially (primarily) in the West. But clearly, thanks to Monckton's successful Australian mission, there's still cause for hope.

Incoherent Brown's Latest Smears Fool No-One

So today we have the first counterpunches from the sputtering Brown smear machine, on the back of some dumb remarks about Labour's debt crisis and out-of-control deficit spending by a bunch of tame Keynesians in a brace of suspiciously timed letters to the Financial Times. Well, more power to them but I prefer to listen to the previous day's crop of economists who rightly warned that we need to bring Labour's economic chaos under control now, or risk an even deeper crisis going forward. And as for Lord Mandelson of La La Land's latest slimy nonsense on the BBC a few minutes ago about businesses telling him that cutting the so-called stimulus now would be 'daft', well, Sir Richard Branson's comments two days ago pretty much shoots that drivel down in flames - and he's a pretty good businessman! Oh, and top work over Redcar Corus, Mandy. That was really slick. What a useless piece of vastly overrated spinning nothingness Mandelson really is.

But Brown. My God, this man is a piece of work. Let's just have a quick look at some of the latest, increasingly desperate claptrap coming out of his gawping piehole today. His claim, first of all, that this crisis was caused by the banks, suggests that he's retreated into the kind of cowardly, "bunker" mentality that caused people to realise how unsalvageably flawed he was, and totally unsuited to the office he took by default, in the first place. For the record, it was his policies and his light-touch, hopelessly inadequate system of regulation that allowed the banks to behave with such recklessness in the first place. It was his actual encouragement of the property bubble and the massive personal debt bubble that left people so exposed when the bust came. His behaviour, and blinkered, hateful arrogance in suggesting that he had 'abolished boom and bust', virtually guaranteed that when the bubble burst, Britain would be the most exposed major economy in the world and the British people would be the biggest losers. The point is, his ridiculous claim that this was 'all the banks' fault' is palpably ridiculous - and was proved as such long ago.

But that's just he start of it. Instead of stopping the digging while the hole wasn't too deep, he brings out the JCB. This is the Telegraph's report of his, quite frankly, lunatic remarks:

2010 must be the year of growth. It must not be the year when the economy dips back into recession.

''Instead of admitting the mistakes of private banks and institutions in causing the recession, the well-financed right-wing are not only trying to blame governments for the crisis but trying to use legitimate concerns about deficits to scare people into accepting a bleak and austere picture of the future for the majority, and then to use what's happening as a pretext for public services to be marginalised at precisely the moment they should become smarter and more personalised.

''They are using the talk of action on debt to conceal the hard fact that their real position is that they remain wedded, as they have always been, to an ideology that would always make government the problem and deny people the helping hand that government can be.''

While seeking to ''frighten'' voters about the scale of the debt, Conservatives failed to mention that growth would automatically cut into the UK's deficit and bolster investor confidence, said Mr Brown.

''Instead of helping the recovery in our country, Conservative dislike of government, bordering on hatred of government action, would risk recovery now,'' he said.

Never had I really understood how unhinged this guy actually is until I heard this stuff. Aside from the truly awe-inpiring level of economic illiteracy on display, there's the spiteful reference to the 'hatred' of the 'right'. With the former, someone needs to bellow this at the fraud relentlessly: it's not rocket science, Brown, it's basic economics: rising debt means rising inflation; rising inflation means interest rate hikes; interest rate hikes mean higher credit costs with the inevitable consequences of increased business failures, personal insolvencies, higher unemployment, worse public services and, you guessed it, a recession. Not growth, Brown, a r-e-c-e-s-s-i-o-n. Do you think it'd get through that four inch thick skull of his in the end? No, me neither.

Of course, though, we know the ulterior motive here. Brown does not give hoot-one about the catastrophe his "policies" would cause over the next few years, all he cares about, in his fevered political calculations, is the time when he finally, finally!, has to face the electorate. He thinks he can buy votes and sod the future. We are, quite simply, with Brown, back to square one. It's 2008-9 all over again. The guy is incapable of any other mode of thought or operation.

Only this time, with this horribly divisive speech, he's shown a little more of the true, tribal, irrational, Tory-hating core that we know is what fundamentally defines this appalling man. And this is where we see the incoherence:

...their real position is that they remain wedded, as they have always been, to an ideology that would always make government the problem and deny people the helping hand that government can be

This is a smear, obviously, but the scale of the misrepresentation is only topped by the scope of its implausibility. It hardly warrants scrutiny (it certainly doesn't bear any). However, I'll have a crack - again, just for the record. Clearly, as with most smears, it's what's omitted that's most revealing. For instance, it's not 'government' that the Conservatives have ever seen as 'the problem' (as far as I can discern, Tories aren't anarchists), it's big, inefficient government. Further, though, you notice how he confuses (and I don't believe this is deliberate - I think he actually might not understand the distinction, which, if true, is most revealing) the term 'government' with the term 'state'. Government makes policy and enacts law accordingly. The instruments of government (like the MoD), and taxpayer-funded institutions of public service (like the NHS), of which there are many, are what is generally understood, at least in the real world, to be 'the state'. When the instruments of government, public service institutions and government itself have been permitted to become so bloated, inefficient and unaffordable that they begin to cause, overall, more harm than good, then yes, they must be pruned, reformed and reset so that once more (or, in the case of some state institutions, 'for once') they can fulfil their putative functions. To deny any of this is to defy rational thought. But that's what Brown does, in choosing smear and mere narrow-minded tribalism over common sense and, simply, the truth. Plus ca change? Not really: this is Brown we're talking about.

The only difference this time is the incoherence. We're used to the Tory-hating smears - they go with the Brown territory. But combined - and total - confusion over the economy and the difference between government and state is something fairly new, at least to me. I can understand the economic incoherence. Given the state of the British economy after a decade of Chancellor Brown and three further years of him as First Lord of the Treasury, it's not hard to see where that comes from. But this government/state thing: I feel that he really, genuinely, doesn't see a difference; he thinks they are one and the same. Government is the State; people are merely units of that State whose sole purpose is to service it in order that it can provide for them.

Oh my God! Brown really is a socialist! So that's what's been bugging me all this time...

New Labour might have fooled some of the people some of the time, but Brown is fooling no one. His brand of state socialism, masquerading as some kind of government altruism, is not what Britain needs just now, thanks very much (did it ever?). Bring on the election so we can have done with it.

Loony Left Equals Loony Greens - And Vice Versa...

(As if we didn't know.)

Iain Dale spotted this extraordinarily vicious rant by left wing blogger and Labour stooge, Sunny Hundal, earlier this evening:

Look at the people who push global warming denialism: Fox News (enough said), The Telegraph (enough said), The Spectator (recently promoting AIDS denialism), Melanie Phillips (enough said), Christopher Booker (has anyone read his Wikipedia entry recently?), James Delingpole (enough said).

These are the kind of fuckwits (Delingpole, Richard North) who think there’s a conspiracy when their article doesn’t appear on Google News or use Google search hits as example of how big the story is.

Calling them ‘denialists’ is being too kind: they should be abused at every instance for the stupidity they churn out. They should be ridiculed, parodied, cussed, and constantly called out for the idiots they are because they deserve it.

Let the scientists do the science. But outside that world is a media full of bullshit artists who have vested interests in promoting ’scepticism’. The Spectator magazine’s hosting of the AIDS denialism film is just one small example. If we retreat on this war between ideologies by trying to be nice, while all they do is throw vitriol and propaganda, then we’ve already lost... There is no reason to take these people seriously or even off them an ounce of respect. If that means the political debate is charged – so be it.

Desperate.

It seems that this moron is calling on loony greens everywhere to be as "vitriolic" (to use his term), violently offensive and libelous/slanderous as possible wherever and whenever they detect any sign of criticism (or "scepticism" and "denialism" as they prefer to call it in their world of anti-debate) of the whole MMCC scam. But is he saying this in the name of the "Green" movement? Of course not, he's saying in the name of the socialist, labour movement to which he subscribes, which hijacked the Green agenda long ago and turned it into what it is today: a misanthropic, anti-capitalist, post-Soviet redux masquerading as an environmental crusade. It's therefore hardly surprising that the sickening slur "denier" is used so frequently. It deliberately associates critics of the warmist agenda with neo-nazis. (Marxists, socialists and communists always were very good at propaganda, after all. And nothing else.)

My point is that the next time anyone is smeared with the term "denier" in public, by dishonest socialists like Hundal, the answer is to sue for defamation. Immediately. It's that serious. Oh, and there I was wondering why the left has suddenly become so obsessed with the libel laws of Great Britain. Now I know: they want to make it impossible for people to protect themselves against mad watermelons like Hundal, who, once the libel laws of this country have been suitably twisted in their favour, would be able to call anyone anything he liked for any reason he chooses. For that reason, and many others, idiots like Hundal and his ilk, deaf as they are to criticism (mindless doctrinaire socialists always are) and blind as they are to the realities of climate change (it's got bugger all to do with people), can be considered a menace to democracy and a threat to freedom of speech and other inalienable human rights. And they should be treated as such; as loonies.

Unfortunately, they also happen to be calling the shots at the moment. So the peril is real. At least until a cure is found for the thought disease that is causing it.

Incidentally, if any doubt remains in your mind about the connection between post-soviet communists and the modern Green, AGW-pushing bandwagon, read this bizarre, pretty troubling article by "former" committed communist, Bea Campbell, from the Guardian (where else?) a few weeks ago. It's titled, rather unsurprisingly, "Why I turned from red to green."

Here's an extract if you can't face the whole thing:

The Green critique of modernity's Faustian recklessness helps to make sense not only of capitalism but also the tragedies of state socialisms. For progressives, whose politics hover between the centre and the far left, this is decisive.

The communist states of the 20th century did for socialism. I was a dynastic communist – my parents were British Bolsheviks, they were good citizens, and became better when Khrushchev gave permission to criticise Stalinism. All that crashed with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. They could not relinquish the Soviet Union, and thereafter our family rows were on the terrain of Russia. The worst insult my father could hurl was: "You're just a social democrat!"

I remained a communist until 1989, when it was all over. I was part of the anti-Stalinist, Euro-communist wing. We were clever, caused trouble, caught the imagination, but we lost. Or maybe we failed.

Green ideology represents the reconciliation of production and reproduction – that is what yields sustainability.

See? Once a red loony, now a green loony - but still really a red loony, just daubed with lashings of green propaganda. There's no epiphany, just extreme vanity and extremism. In fact, this person and so many like her are just about as egomaniacal as it's possible for a human being to be without actually regressing fully into some form of narcissistic solipsism; a complete but ecstatic break from reality. But they cling on with their fingernails and the support of like-minded, wrongheaded individuals, who serve merely to service and reinforce their delusions.

And people wonder why I'm doubtful that man made climate change is a real, measurable phenomenon, especially after the Climategate scandal (and the emerging, similar NASA story). Well, not people like the loony Hundal, actually. He just thinks I'm a nazi. Nice - and QED: the man is not sane.

One thing is certain, though, David Cameron might have gone green in the name of saving human beings from their tendency to like to keep warm, but he had better wake up to the fact pretty pronto that he's playing with political fire.

EU Declares War on the City

As if any more evidence were needed of the seriousness of the ongoing power drain from Westminster to Brussels, we now hear that the latter has now brought forward legislation to regulate Britain's all-important financial sector, its main target being the City. Dan Hannan reveals all:

When I warned against the EU’s Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive five months ago, some of you felt I was laying it on a bit thick. And it’s true that my language was strong: “The City is staring into the abyss,” I wrote. “If the proposed EU directive on hedge funds goes through, London will go the way of Bruges, Venice and Amsterdam: a once dominant financial entrepôt sidelined by more virile cities.”

If you still think I was exaggerating, read this. So much for the idea that the most objectionable parts of the proposal were likely to be modified. Responsibility for the oversight of financial services will be shifted, with malign and irrevocable consequences, to the EU. London will be regulated by Brussels. Three new EU institutions will be responsible for invigilating an industry which, while marginal in most EU states, is critical to the United Kingdom. Like all bureaucracies, these institutions will enlarge their remit year by year until they bear no resemblance to the agencies originally envisaged. Those who mislike and mistrust Anglo-Saxon capitalism will at last be in a position to control it. All to solve a non-existent problem.

What are you waiting for, you hedgies, you derivatives traders, you bankers who see no reason why the state should dictate the terms of your contracts, you pension fund managers, you City solicitors, you who work in the ancillary industries, from conference organisers to chauffeurs? Are you all planning to join the emigration queue? Isn’t it at least worth putting up a fight?

It might be for them, but clearly the British government, which has caved in on this and so many other issues involving the giant steamroller that is the EU, has already made its mind up about the future of the United Kingdom of GB and NI. The fight was fought and lost when we were denied the referendum on Lisbon/the Constitution. Whatever follows - and this is just the start of it - I for one fear that the blind Europhiles (and they inhabit every mainstream British political party), who've somehow been hoodwinked by the socialist-federalists into believing that if you allow unelected, faceless Brussels officials to pass laws your country must obey, you are somehow not selling out the electorate of that country, have already done the permanent damage. Against the wishes of 65%+ of the UK population, and a majority of the people of the rest of Europe, too, it really looks like they might have won. They are about to take down the City, an institution that has long been in their crosshairs. The only question left to ask, powerless spectators as we now are, is "what will be next?"

Incidentally, the article to which Hannan refers in the first paragraph reads as follows:

A pan-European watchdog should be given powers to stop short-selling, according to a European Union report that also calls for tough sanctions against hedge funds that fail to curb pay, borrowing and risk-taking.

The European Union is examining new rules for the funds and others. This week, Jean-Paul Gauzes, a French member of the European parliament appointed to broker a deal on the law, will issue a report outlining the direction the EU should take.

In the document, obtained by Reuters, Gauzes writes: "In exceptional circumstances and in order to ensure the stability ... of the financial system ... the European Securities and Markets Authority (a proposed new body) may take the decision to restrict short-selling activities".

He wants the authorities to be able to "impose a temporary prohibition of professional activity" or "request the freezing ... of assets."

Britain, which itself imposed a ban on short-selling at the height of the crisis, could view the bid to cede power to a European watchdog as an attempt to dilute its influence over London, home to most European hedge funds.

Gauzes' recommendation goes further than most had expected and is twinned with other proposals to clamp down on hedge funds and other specialist financial investment groups.

He also calls for powers for the European Commission, the EU executive, to allow it impose caps on borrowing by a hedge fund.

"It is considered necessary to allow the Commission to impose limits in exceptional circumstances on the level of leverage that Alternative Investment Fund Manager could use," he writes.

Both the European Parliament and the bloc's member states share responsibility for writing the final version of the law and Gauzes, who has been appointed to broker a deal in parliament, is central to the process.

FRANCE VS BRITAIN

Gauzes' views are likely to have the backing of France and will be a setback to Britain's attempts to water down the proposed rules to protect London, Europe's financial capital and a major driver of Britain's economy.

Short-selling typically involves an investor borrowing shares and selling them on in the hope that the price will fall and he can repay the lender with stock bought for less. The British government temporarily outlawed the practice when its big banks, already teetering on the brink of collapse, were further undermined by short-sellers.

Gauzes now wants the funds to give extensive information about how they are investing as well as agreeing to cap the amount they will borrow, which many will see as restricting the much-prized freedom to switch investment strategies quickly.

During the crisis, hedge funds have come under increasing suspicion, prompting the European Commission, or EU executive, to draft rules to keep close tabs on a group that one politician has dubbed locusts.

Even if we wanted to fight back, I'm really not certain we can any more. Nature - or rather history - will simply have to run its course. That history (or rather future) does not look good for Britain on the strength of this piece of evidence. It doesn't look good for Europe either, frankly. The will of the people always triumphs in the end, one way or another.

(Borrowed) Quote of the Day

Letters from a Tory has picked up Dan Hannan's powerful comment on the recent imposition by secret committee of an over-promoted, over-gonged socialist/Labourist paper shuffler, "Baroness" Ashton, on the half a billion people who make-up the entirely undemocratic EU as some sort of "Foreign Minister". In spite of the fact that the BBC was desperately trying to play down the shocking anti-democratic gall of this appointment, proposing - laughably - that it, and the choice of a "boring" Belgian as the so-called EU President, represents the end of the road for EU federalism, the reality remains that, as Michael Portillo said yesterday on This Week to slimy Europhile Chris Huhne, the Eurozone is "not a democratic space". As Portillo went on, it is therefore "impossible to be anything other than Eurosceptic" since, I assume he meant, that that half billion people, including 65 million Britons, are being railroaded into some weird form of liberal/socialist paternalistic authoritarianism.

All these appointments, and the increases in central EU powers they embody, will achieve is to increase the frustration felt by literally hundreds of millions of people at what is rightly perceived as a further undermining not only of the sovereignty of nation states, but also of the principle of representative democracy itself. The EU's democratic deficit has just grown much larger - and, therefore, by the same token, has the threat to European peace in terms of social and political stability. Frustration, if left unassuaged, often boils over into fury. An awful lot of people don't like power grabs, especially surreptitious socialist ones, which is what this latest shameful episode amounts to. It's an insult to our intelligence, not to mention to the memory of hundreds of thousands of British soldiers who died fighting to protect British democracy from a foreign menace.

But, ultimately, to me that's all Ashton's appointment really represents: a bloody insult - and a deliberate one at that.

Dan Hannan:

“Everything about this process rubs our noses in how undemocratic the EU is. It’s not just the way Baroness Ashton was appointed; it’s her whole career. Lady Ashton is a lifelong quangocrat who has never once been elected to anything. She went from running a health authority to working at the National Council for One Parent Families to being a Labour life peer, to leading the Lords, all without facing the voters. She steered the Lisbon Treaty through the Upper House, cancelling the referendum on it that all three parties had promised. She was then appointed to the European Commission because Gordon Brown wanted to avoid a by-election. Now, she gets the top job as a kind of compensation to Labour over the rejection of Tony Blair. Every chapter in the story is a denial of the democratic principle.”

- Dan Hannan takes aim at Baroness Ashton, newly appointed EU foreign affairs supremo (full article HERE)

There's nothing more to add to that. What should follow is action.

"I Thought He Would Grow Out Of It"

Young gargoyle in training: who's his hero, do you reckon?

According to Telegraph comment editor Ceri Radford, citing the Mail, chief gargoyle of the BNP Nick Griffin's own wife thinks he is bonkers and had hoped that he would "grow out of" playing at "stupid politics". I thought this was jolly funny.

Never mind that David Aaronovitch column pointing out exactly howthe BBC should
hold Nick Griffin to account for his holocaust-denying, racist,homophobic views;
my favourite piece of criticism on the BNP leader this week comes from no other
than his wife.

“I worked my a*** off trying to keep us going,” Mrs Griffin has moaned, according to the
Mail. “I’ve been … working to keep us going financially and bring up four children while he’s spent his time playing at stupid politics.” She added that she “though he would grow out of it”.

Not quite her hero, then.

I have my doubts that Griffin will be anything more than a side show on Question Time tonight, thankfully. There are many other things to talk about of far greater import than the sweaty racial fantasies of schoolboy bully who thinks Adolf Hitler was a really cool guy. The Mail says he is "dangerous and deluded". I'm not so sure. Deluded, certainly, but dangerous? Possibly, if his goonery spreads. But the one thing that the Euro elections clearly demonstrated was that pricisely that had not happened to anywhere near the degree expected.

I'm not suggesting for one moment that there should be any complacency, but that on the part, at least, of the Tories there should be no hand-wringing and no shame; they did not create this problem, Labour did. So let Labour wail and gnash their teeth and wonder where it all went wrong. Dismiss their slurs and smears and false associations between the BNP and the Tories for what it is: dishonest propaganda designed to deflect reponsibility for the emergence of a "party" which is as much a product of socialism as Labour itself. As I said in a previous post, the Tories should just ignore Labour's lies and get on with the rough, tough job of clearing up their mess, in this case a serious sociopolitical one.

Do tell me how the programme goes if you're watching it. I don't think I'll bother.

NO2ID Update

For those of you who aren't yet part of the fight against the most chilling assault on our freedoms in the history of our country, here's the latest news. Please click on the link in the sidebar of this blog to find out where to join the struggle to stop the forces of socialism's relentless, all-out attack on our definitive liberties. This Labour government must be removed for so many reasons, but this one is the most urgent of them all.

++ NO2ID Supporters' Newsletter No. 131 - 10th September 2009 ++

*Contacting us:* Call or email the office - 020-7793-4005 or
(office@no2id.net). Please do not reply to this email. (The from address
is not a working email address)

+ MANCHESTER ALERT - DON'T BE A GUINEA PIG +
The Home Secretary's summer re-launch of ID cards targeted Manchester as
a "beacon area" for the roll-out of the first cards. Having backed down
from a fight with airport workers and pilots threatening industrial
action over compulsory ID registration, the Home Office is now trying to
solicit volunteers.
Of course, people don't always read the small print - so we need to
ensure that any 'volunteers' realise that registering for a card means
being tagged and tracked for the rest of their lives. And paying for the
privilege of being Whitehall's guinea pigs.

The fewer that sign up, the easier it should be to scrap the whole scheme.

NO2ID is launching a rolling campaign to alert and inform the people of
Manchester and - as the National Identity Scheme's net widens - the
North West, starting with a day of action on Saturday 10th October.
NO2ID groups and supporters from around the UK will be heading to
selected locations in Greater Manchester to hold street stalls, leaflet
and spread the word.

The following Saturday, 17th October, we shall be running more street
stalls in central Manchester and holding a public meeting at the Friends
Meeting House in Mount Street. Further activities and events will be
announced in due course.

If you or your organisation would like to get involved in either of
these events or the ongoing campaign, please contact
manchester@no2id.net. And if you would like to start your own local
group to help spread the word across the North West, please contact
local.groups@no2id.net.

*+ Making the case against the ID scheme +

*Many people tell us they would like to tackle that minority of friends.
neighbours and work colleagues who still think that 'ID cards' are a
pretty good idea, but need a little help feeling confident of their
ground to do so. NO2ID has plenty of stock of our 24 page practical
booklet on How to Win the argument against the ID scheme. If you would
like a free copy, either for yourself or to pass on to someone else,
then just write and ask to NO2ID, Box 412, 19/21 Crawford St, LONDON W1H
1PJ or email office@no2id.net. (Don't forget to tell us the postal
address to send it to.)

We did not vote for this. We don't have to let it happen to us.
We can stop it, but only if we're truly united.

Jackie Ashley Comments

I just thought I'd take the opportunity to make a quick note of some of the more entertaining responses to Jackie Ashley's fresh assault on the Conservative government in yesterday's Grauniad. "The what?" The Conservative government. No, not the last one, for that one has gone and can be trashed no more. She speaks of the Conservative government that is to come (she's convinced it's coming then).

This left wing ("leftwing" as the Graun hacks prefer to use, pathetically copying the US media) seer seems to think the the next Tory government will be some sort of dystopic nightmare, a la Nineteen Eighty-Four or Darkness At Noon. You know, just like the last one wasn't and just like this Labour government has more-or-less been. Curious.

To be honest, I'm not especially interested in what this silly cow has to say for herself. She (and her husband) are the journalistic equivalent of soggy toilet tissue as far as I'm concerned. But some of the comments 'below the line' - some from people whom I know have absolutely no love for the Tories - are quite refreshing and, in fact, far more interesting than the original, basically dishonest bit of lefty propaganda penned by the other half of the Marrs show. If you really want to read it then you can find it on the Graun website. I wouldn't recommend it, unless you're very bored, so I haven't bothered to link to it.

A few of the comments...

1. "stevehill":

What are they supposed to do? They're history and they know it.

They can't uninvade the Middle East. They can't credibly repeal reams of legislation like 4,000 new criminal offences and manic control-freak surveillance without looking stupid. They've been well and truly rumbled on the fact that their "investment" in better public services has been at the price of mortgaging my childrens' futures, and probably their children too, while they've studiously ignored the hard questions like public sector pensions.

I'd like to say "the left" faces being out of office for a generation, possibly for ever. But let's be honest, "the left" has already been out of office since 1979. It is not only an ex-parrot, the species is extinct.

The Guardian kindly provides a forum for a few nostalgic old relics to muse and dream about what might have been.

2. "CybilWrights"

Cloud cuckoo land.

a big expansion in further education, F.E has been all but privatised under Labour and the workforce demoralised by new and onerous contracts.

public investment in transport Oh yeah? Where? Most weekends you can't get a train anywhere because they've all been cancelled.

success in containing terrorism The worst terrorist atrocity - the London bombings - took place because of and following Labour's wars of aggression - they caused this terrorism.

You need a reality check, Ms Ashley. I've never voted Tory and probably never will, but I'd rather have them than this bunch of authoritarian, spendthrift, high-taxing, freedom-hating, war-mongering, expense-fiddling liars.

3. "EvilTory"

More scaremongering about a possible Tory government, Jackie?

This country needs a bonfire of its quangos; indeed one could go so far as to say that every single one should be closed down, its senior management and directors banned for life from public office, and their responsibilities passed on to elected MPs and mayors and councillors. Who, let's face it, could hardly do a worse job than the tens of thousands of petty paperpushers we are stuck with now. And that's before the enormous duplication and the total lack of accountability that quangos embody.

That you support such organisations is not surprising; you are after all a 'big government' social democrat judging from your writings. Personally I think government is by and large the problem, not the solution, but I suppose we can disagree on that.

However I do have to ask you, do you honestly believe that an incoming Tory government can be worse than the current one? Could waste more of our money? Fail to replace more of our power stations? Send more of our troops into battle inadequately supplied and equipped?

Cameron has his faults, but he's not Hitler, and he'd pretty much have to be to outdo brown in the civil liberties destruction stakes. Or don't they count either?

Yes, a Tory government will do things people on the centre left and left will hate. Tough. We've had to put up with the current bastards for more than a decade. At least a Tory government will be moderately fair and reasonably competent.

Who knows, maybe a Tory government will do something really liberal, such as scrap ID cards and ASBOs. Or perhaps junk the entire government funding for multiculturalism that has fucked up race relations in this country for forty years and more. Seeing Trevor Phillips and his whole cretinous and racist organisation on the dole would certainly make me happier than seeing another battalion of soldiers come home to P45s.

Sorry jackie, but I can't agree with this article; Labour have done far more harm than the minimal good they have achieved. Why don't all you Labour supporters vote libdem instead? They can't be worse, and will likely be much better, than your current loyalty.

4. "1nn1t"

I'll start the list of what's not going so well:

Social Services - broken
Lots of new graduates - no jobs
Banks - broken
Housing - unaffordable
Army - inadequately equipped
Immigration Controls - broken
Unemployment - lots, and rising
Power cuts - due soon
Prisons - full, and getting fuller
Railways - trains only run on Sundays if someone feels like driving one
University Science Departments - fewer than ever
Pubs - illegal to sing in them
Smoking ban - closing pubs
Teenagers - drinking more heavily than ever
Illegal Drugs - universally available
Income Tax - collected from people on benefits

and someone else please continue the list..

And so it goes on. And on and on and on. Ashley getting comprehensively trashed by her own readership. Not quite on the scale of the regular monstering Polly gets, but very entertaining nonetheless. At least we know what the Graun (and the Beeb) will be whingeing about in the coming years. "Tory cuts" will be the main theme, even though they absolutely know that what they will be attacking will be policies the Labour Party would have had to follow too, anyway - or finally destroy the economy for good. The Tories will have to cut spending to clear up Labour's monumental, catastrophic mismanagement of the economy, which has left us in the icy wastes of the deepest recession since WWII.

So what's new?

Section A, Q1: Spot The Difference

From a 1968, O-level Maths paper. One of two that gave you two hours to answer umpteen questions you wouldn't find on most A-level courses these days.

Cf: GCSE "Higher" Tier, June 2008.
Um.

And:Still haven't worked it out? I'll give you a clue: one is a Maths exam for 16 year-olds being trained for adulthood and a working life, the other is an infantile joke that 600,000 British "kids" preparing for a life of texting each uvva and the dole have just "passed".

We're finished. And socialism finished us.

Welfare Murder

Been chaos at work for the last week or so, hence the recent abandoned feel of this inconsequential little blog. Just thought I'd take the opportunity to make a note of the excellent recent blog of Ed West in the DT which says everything I would like to have said about the welfare state's complicity in the murder of Baby P, Haringey-style.

Of everything I’ve read about Tracey Connelly today, this little titbit stands out:

And when paramedics were called to the house on August 3, 2007, to find Peter blue and cold in his blood-spattered cot, they were horrified when his mother kept the ambulance waiting while she searched for her cigarettes.

That says it all. I know conservative commentators risk accusations of playing politics over an infant’s death, but if we’re to reduce the frequency of such cases in the future (we’ll never stop them) we need to be honest. Tracey Connelly was the ideal welfare state client - paid hundreds of pounds of taxpayer’s money every week to sit at her council-funded home getting drunk and fat, surfing the internet for poker and porn, sexually incontinent and lazy, totally irresponsible about her offspring and skilled only at taking advantage of naive liberals in social services.

She grew up in shocking chaos herself, the product of a one-night stand between a drug-addict and a paedophile, and with that background Oxbridge was never likely to be on the cards. Neither her biological nor step-father was up to much; but her surrogate father, the state, did not help either by throwing money her way. Her entire life seemed to be a litany of bad behaviour being rewarded by the authorities – every time she did something bad or stupid, they did something nice for her, until finally she, along with her mentally sub-normal, violent boyfriend and his even nastier brother, went too far.

I’m a Haringey resident and pay their extortionate council tax rate, but I would have been happy to contribute towards giving Peter Connelly a decent life. Instead our money ensured his death. In December 2006 Peter’s injuries were deemed so bad that he was taken away and placed with a friend for a few weeks, before being handed back again. So what did the council do to punish his mother? They took away her three-bedroom flat and gave her a larger four-bedroom house.

What did they expect? That rewarding someone for bad behaviour would stop that behaviour? Have the authorities lost track with human nature? Baby Peter’s life ended in that four-bedroom house, his death assisted by a welfare state that is as dysfunctional as any alternative family model. It’s become a cliche to rant about single mothers and their free council flats, but one of the under-reported, unintended consequences of the system is that such properties attract a breed of work-shy, violent “stepfathers” and sometimes, in this case, their family or friends.

The statistics suggest that children living in step-families are 100 times more likely to suffer fatal abuse than children whose biological father is at home, while analysis of 35 cases of fatal abuse between 1968 and 1987 showed children living with a unrelated men were 70 times at risk. And why do some many children live in such high-risk surroundings? Because the state encourages it.

Liberalism is supposed to help the weak and the defenceless against the bad and the strong, but in its unintended consequences the welfare system now does the opposite. Despite the money spent by the state, or perhaps because of it, Peter Connelly’s brief and pathetic life was lived in Dickensian poverty. It is a problem we are unable to cure because, unlike the Victorian social reformers, who understood that eliminating poverty required improving both the physical and moral state of the poor, our campaigners for “social justice” do not believe in being judgmental.

Until we change that attitude, and our welfare system, many more children will die in circumstances like Baby P.

The only dot that remains unjoined here is the direct responsibility of the British Left for the long chain of events that led to this parlous, feral, savage and nationwide state of affairs. It grieves me that mindless "progressives" like Mary Drivell are still peddling their incontinent claptrap in the main pages of Ed West's broadsheet. But not half as much as it grieves me to contemplate just how much damage and harm the social experiments politicians that share her shade of red have done.

The murder of Baby P is a "progressive" murder. Those who Mary cheerleads for should be held accountable.

French Education Works

We couldn't build a Millau Viaduct

The weekend section of the Torygraph contained one the most prejudiced, petty and perverse comments I have read in quite a long time. Why the writer, Anthony Gardner, felt the need to include it in his otherwise reasonably decent article about French education is quite beyond me. The quote, from some ditsy PGCE-fodder named Louis Burnett-Hall, does serve a purpose, however. It perfectly encapsulates the reality of education in Britain today: because inadequate idiots like this one have a say in how our children are taught, this country is producing a generation of under-educated, maladjusted depressives.

But make your own mind up, do:

Louisa Burnett-Hall, who trained as a teacher in London before moving to Paris, believes that high French exam results come at a personal cost. “If the ideal in British education is to produce a happy, well-balanced child who reaches his or her full potential, the French ideal is simply to instil knowledge. The idea of having fun doesn’t exist."

A "personal cost" for God's sake. That's the whole point. If you instil that discipline into children they will achieve all that they can to the best of their abilities. Teaching a child that nothing comes easy and nothing is free is the only way to "produce a happy, well-rounded individual". Learning how to make a serious academic effort is not "fun" (at least at first. With an inspirational teacher in charge, it often becomes fun, though. That's the joy.). You have, as a teacher, done your duty if you have unlocked a child's latent talents. But that comes only with an enormous effort of will on the part of teacher and child. That will can never be generated by a teacher who is more worried about spurious child psychology theories than the information they are ostensibly paid to transmit. The will is unlocked by the process of learning, but only through bloody hard work.

Fail to show children the level of commitment necessary to make the most of their strengths and you have betrayed them. You do not deserve to be a teacher. French teachers know that. Unlike their politically indoctrinated, fun-loving, woolly-headed counterparts in Britain, they know that there are certain places sociological experimentation cannot go. One of those places is the classroom. No doubt to say this is a thoughtcrime nowadays, but true education is all about "elitism", because that always has to be the aim: to be elite. And believe me, children understand that completely. If you teach a child that it's OK to fail then you might as well take that child out of school and put him directly onto welfare (which is something many young girls do themselves anyway in Britain now).

I'm not going to bang on about this much more. It's too depressing. Besides, it just confirms what I've always suspected: of course with many exceptions, British teachers are fundamentally lazy - intellectually, morally and practically. That laziness is basically the only thing they transmit to our nation's most precious resource, our children. And then they justify their failure by saying success is just too hard to reach and shouldn't be forced on the young. So while the Grandes Ecoles churn out happy, well-balanced experts in their fields who build French nuclear power stations and the large hadron collider, or who choose to commit themselves to passing on the benefit of their studies to a new generation of French young, we have to bring in Americans to build the useless Dome and Australians to build the underwhelming Wembley. We build wobbly foot bridges. France builds Viaduc de Millau Bridge. I watched this excellent documentary last night about the North Sea oil boom. I am certain Britain simply doesn't have the expertise any more to pull something like that off again. And that is the result of a corrupted education system that has failed and polluted our children. (There is one, simple word that explains everything you need to know about how and why this has happened: Labour!)

Suffice to say, if you think, as this Burnett-Hall fool does, that the only way to produce "happy" and "well-balanced" children who reach their full potential is by wrapping them in left wing cotton wool, then there is no hope for you. You must have been educated in Britain. If, however, you recognise that the only way to turn children, who crave structure, leadership, discipline, knowledge and, above all, a real challenge, into "happy", "well-balanced" adults (who really do reach their full potential) is by supplying them with exactly what they crave, then congratulations. France might let you be a teacher in one of her schools.

PS: If you have ever seen the wonderful, moving Être et avoir, you will know precisely what I mean.

By the Left...

George Galloway in Leeds Yesterday: "I'm ready, comrades."

Rag for communist wannabes, The Morning Star's editorial, usually a source of endless entertainment for yours truly in a Carry-On film, low farce sort of way, can't have amused Gordon McStalin or Mick McGorbals very much yesterday:

...we should kick out the money-grabbing new Labour elite who are dragging the party's name through the mud - and keep the decent old Labour MPs who are serving working people rather than riding the expenses gravy train.

Harsh words - and after the hammering Labour took from Socialist Worker too, one might be forgiven for thinking there's a pattern emerging here. Bear with me as I make the case with a series of falsifiable premisses:

The far left inhabit the unions; the unions pay for the Parliamentary Labour Party and keep it afloat - just about (it is bankrupt, after all); the far left has been made to feel as alientated from what they call 'the labour movement' as ordinary labour loyalists; they will begin to agitate from within the unions for the leadership to be overthrown; they will begin to withhold funding donations until the leadership is overthrown, crippling the parliamenary party; the Labour leadership will be overthrown in June of this year.

Conclusions? Labour will experience unprecedented and increasing levels of infighting in the run-up to the general election; Labour will not merely lose the general election, it will be wiped-out; Labour will split; Labour will become the third party and the Liberals will once again become the main opposition party.

This is no longer idle speculation. An invigorated and resurgent Tory party is one thing, but Brown and the entire Labour hierarchy better get their furry little minds set firmly on the real threat to their authority - to theirs and their party's futures, in fact: the threat from the left.

Let's hope they epically fail do something about it before it's too late, as usual.

New Front Against Brown Gathers Strength

Brown: Red Scare!

With the imminent rebellion of Left wingers on the back benches over the planned privatisation of Royal Mail already a major headache for Brown and Labour, it will be a shock for them to discover that over at socialistworker.co.uk, favoured organ of your more hardline red, they are being held responsible for the expenses scandal, too. Someone called Simon Basketcase writes:

The Tories at least are aware of the damage done by the scandal. David Cameron has let it be known that it will make it more difficult for an incoming Tory government to attack public services and cut benefits.

This is truly a scandal for Labour. That rich Tories use our money for their moats or chandeliers is as unsurprising as it is offensive. But Labour is supposed to be different.

Over the years many a former left wing MP has ended up seduced by the perks of parliament. But this is more fundamental and systematic.

When one is in power one gets friends in low places. Because Brown and New Labour have been in love with business for so long, they don’t even notice when they adopt business practices – fiddling the expenses and feathering their own nest.

Some stupid old Tories claiming expenses for messing around with their piles in the country has undoubtably provided more manure for the fertile imaginations of these students of Karl Marx. But that seems not to bother them as much as the fact that their comrades in parliament have been, as the author puts it, 'fiddling the expenses and feathering their own nests' too.

(Hat tip to excellent blogger Prodicus here). That one of their own, left winger and part-time comedian Bob Marshall Andrews, a rich QC, has been troughing it like there's no tomorrow (for him, that's true) will send them apoplectic. As Simon Basketcase says:

The New Labour government is in terminal crisis...When the next politician decides to lecture ordinary people about their behaviour or the need to make sacrifices, an angry mob should burn them out of their second home.

Man the battlements, then (literally, in Douglas Hogg's case) and prepare for a siege. This is very serious for Brown - if it could actually get any more serious - because the assault from the left flank, who now regard themselves as 'True Labour', or maybe the 'Real NEC'? - well, something that distinguishes them from running dog, splittist, reactionary, crypto-fascist NewLabourism - is very real and gaining momentum.

There could be dire consequences for Labour, in terms of its very existence, never mind its status as one of the two main parties, if the Left goes for all out attack. Basketcase again:

But in order to achieve anything, the union leaders have to encourage a fight against the government instead of slavishly following the Labour Party.

The enemy's at the gates, Gordon. You're surrounded. You'd better think of something - and fast.