Toleration is not living peaceably with our neighbours because we agree about everything. Toleration is living peaceably with our neighbours even when we disagree with them.
CAN is not the mouthpiece of any particular political party or pressure group.
I'm not a member, fee-paying or otherwise, of any association or group more power-seeking than my local sports centre and the city library.
Much of the trouble with our country today is that the main political parties seem to hold similar views and policies on the great questions of the day; that is, they all pretty much seem to think that the government knows best.
Well, mostly, it doesn’t.
Government can perform a few basic tasks simply and well (usually of the sort of task that involves protecting people as they go about their own private business). Once it tries to improve peoples’ lives in detail it becomes muddled, expensive, frustrated, confused and then - very quickly - overbearing and authoritarian. The Big Three parties, with honourable exceptions, go along with the line that freedom and our country’s other traditional virtues and treasures are of little value compared with administrative efficiency and their ideas of what sort of good lives we ought to be pursuing.
There are several smaller parties which actively seek to put freedom and other traditional blessings of living in Britain at a premium. Where appropriate* I publicize and link to them.
So, independent of all groups and affiliations, CAN recognizes that our country and its traditional values have been built by generations of men and women of all political persuasions and of none; men and women working and sometimes fighting and lobbying and trading ideas to make our homeland better.
Britain’s virtues are the product of all that and it often involved great sacrifice – sometimes the greatest sacrifice. So we should honour them and the spirit of what they achieved by recognizing that Britain is home to all of us and any and all of us may have an equal interest in keeping the best of it.
I’ll try to publicize all recognizably freedom-loving and patriotic campaigns and groups – even if I don’t personally agree with something about them.
This is because:
A) they might be right and I might be wrong, and
B) people of goodwill can legitimately love this country and its freedoms and traditions and still have differing viewpoints of how best to serve it and within the limits of being law-obeying and peaceable, I’ll link to them.
For example, freedom and public safety are both valuable things, and they are often in conflict with one another as far as legislation is concerned. A great many freedom-loving people opposed both the 90 day or 42 day detention periods for anti-terrorism legislation. A small minority – or so it seemed to me – supported 90 days, including me.
‘Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,’ – what to do when life is at odds with liberty, or pursuing happiness threatens life? Both viewpoints were seeking to maintain some virtue or other in public life in Britain. So both would get a chance on this blog.
I’m a keen trade unionist myself – the Tolpuddle Martyrs and all that – for all the faults which our unions still display even today. CAN is not about trade or employment disputes and campaigns; they are usually well-supported elsewhere. Good luck to them when their cause is just, but that’s not what this blog is about.
CAN is also not about exposing and criticizing the wickedness of commercial businesses. The web’s scattered with such sites and campaigns. But when companies are acting on the instructions of excessive government or using illegitimate powers that government has given to them, this blog will point it out and welcomes information of that type.
It’s all about Britain’s traditional political and civic culture and its values; the foremost being freedom but there are others: tolerance; widespread property ownership; privacy; civic pride.
So CAN points its arrows right at excessive government and its institutions;global, European, national regional and local, along with its agents and intellectual cheerleaders in the media, the academy, the ‘voluntary sector’, ‘private companies’ that are largely dependent in the public purse and the arts.
*‘Appropriate’ here means: actually freedom-loving rather than pretending to love it for nefarious purposes. It means; being peaceable; law-abiding and positive about equality under the law of all of Britain’s lawful residents; native subjects, naturalized incomers and temporary visitors alike. Put bluntly, the good guys won the Battle of Britain and the bad guys lost, and that’s that as far as this blog is concerned.
Welcome to Britain's online freedom resources blog.
Our shared antagonist is an over-mighty and impertinent government along with its supporters and cheerleaders in the media and academia.
What is Citizens and Neighbours?
CAN is a place where people who struggle against excessive and untraditional authority can find information:
# information about others who are concerned about how our country, our continent and our world are being changed # information about who is in charge of foolish or malicious attacks on our freedom and against our other traditional rights, and information about how to find them and tell them they are doing wrong # information about who also is resisting the destruction that wrong-headed politicians and officials are doing # information about resources that they can use to protect their own, and our own, free way of life # information about the course of campaigning– its successes and failures and warnings of governmental foolishness to come
CAN is also intended to be a place where people of varied backgrounds and interests can find out that far from being alone they are in fact part of a large majority of folk who do not like what is being done to Britain and its institutions.
I hope that this blog’s visitors will contact people in other specialized campaigns and see if they can find common cause; pool time, resources, and manpower.
This blog publicizes campaigns, ideas, freedom-loving and traditional organisations and people, but it does not necessarily endorse the activities, opinions or candidates of any of the organisations that it lists.
The tone of the blog is intended to be upbeat, cheerful and in the spirit of 'can do'!
Please comment and offer ideas and suggestions, or point out errors and send links to groups and campaigns you believe are aimed in preserving the best of Britain. Can do.
At the right-hand side are links menus which allow you to find specific kinds of stuff.
The top one menu: ‘All About CAN,’ links to pages that explain the blog itself (like this one.)
There’s a home link in each page that’ll get you back to the main page ‘ABOUT THIS SITE.’
The second menu, ‘Themes and Topics’ takes you to main blog pages that act to introduce topics and list links to articles, groups, and other sites where you can discover campaign about freedom and the British way of life in particular subject areas such as education or defence.
Most pages have two links at the bottom – ‘Home’ which will bring you back to the main page again, or one entitled ‘How to find stuff in Citizens and Neighbours’ which will bring you back to this very page.
The third menu, ‘Resources and People’ links to main pages which list, well, the tools of freedom and democracy; media and organisation contacts, politician s and how to find them, and articles on particular subjects intended to inspire or to warn.
The fourth menu, ‘Labels,’ refers to labels which are at the bottom of each blog page which list themes or types of subject, names of campaigns or issues, and even place names and peoples’ names. Scroll down this alphabetical list to and click on one to generate a reverse-chronological order list of pages about or containing a topic or name, such as ‘terrorism’ or ‘Europe.’
Use the labels list to find events in particular county/metropolitan areas. For wider searches by geography, search under the following labels: national, Europe, global.
The most recent post will always show at the top of the blog when you first browse to it from elsewhere.
For all its faults, past and present, Britain remains one of the best countries in the world in which to live. It’s been this way for a long time.
Britain’s rulers: kings and lords; magistrates and clerics; merchants and scholars and councillors learned over hard and bloody centuries to govern with a light touch compared with their Continental counterparts; respecting the differences between the local customs of different places and the rights of the people who lived there.
Using the Common Law in England and Wales, for example, and some measure of common sense, there grew up in these islands a culture of toleration, freedom, and justice.
It was never any paradise; far from it (especially for the poor in times of famine and economic depression) but because of that light touch there was often more room for people to move – to make their lives better, to seek new homes in new towns or villages and new trades and to start new families without the permission of their ‘betters.’ Freedom to travel, to marry as you will, to seek better employment and to improve your lot in life, freedom even to rise in rank in Britain’s ever class-conscious society if you can…freedom is an unequalled treasure.
Tolerant and welcoming, (also indifferent and negligent – the two sides of the same coin ) Britain has long been a refuge for visitors who came to escape persecution and war elsewhere.
Britain’s rulers - though as capable of cruelty greed and stupidity as mortal humans can be - tended to leave such visitors to their own devices. Usually they were not helped at all by government but left free to prosper or otherwise as talent, hard work and luck would have it. It was no paradise for such people, but under less than oppressive laws Britain became richer in every sense because of such new subjects.
Freedom - unevenly distributed as many of the good things in life often are - became the hidden foundation of British life.
Freedom creates other treasures and virtues.
Freedom allows for good government.
The presumption amongst Britain’s rulers that the common people have rights, that there are things that rulers may not demand of them; that there are things that are none of government’s business, has often made for a large measure of consent and acceptance by the governed of those few duties that their rulers did place upon them. The government didn’t always ask for too much and so it was given – usually (we can be revolting when we have a mind to) – without too much resistance.
But always with a maximum of grumbling. This is Britain, after all.
Freedom encourages obedience to the law.
When laws are few in number and easily understood, and when they match the way most folk think about right and wrong, then people tend to co-operate with authority when it enforces the laws on those who break them. Knowing that you’re free to do pretty much what you want often makes it easier to accept a few obligations to authority. Not always – nothing’s ever perfect – but often. This makes for a highly law-abiding society, and it was until quite recently a feature that foreigners were wont to comment upon when visiting here from lands where the rulers and their laws were hated, resented, and disobeyed.
Freedom encourages neighbourliness.
If a person or a family knows where they are in life: what the laws are and what their obligations are to the authorities and their neighbours, and if those obligations aren’t felt to be too onerous and if they end somewhere and leave a large measure of privacy and freedom, then there is little motive or power to interfere with, and persecute, the equally free lives of their neighbours.
People are still human: bossy, nosy, snobbish and envious as may be but widespread freedom and well-enforced laws of privacy and property allow people to get along mostly unmolested by their all-too-human fellow-citizens.
Just a soon as they bring the hedge-clippers back and shut that blasted dog up…
Freedom encourages prosperity.
Left alone by the authorities, people are quite capable of and willing to, make a living. They will go to great lengths to better their lives and their families’ comfort and security. Almost all the great inventions of technology, the techniques of using them and working practices are due to the tendency of free people to find lazier, easier, cheaper ways of making a living. And when they have something to sell that is better, quicker, cheaper, more abundant or easier to use, then the whole country benefits: often immediately but sometimes a little later.
Customers are better or more cheaply provided for. New staff is recruited by innovating businesses or are recruited into new ones as new jobs are created. Working people can specialize and improve and refine their skills to make them more valuable and therefore better paid. Suppliers have more prosperous and more secure customers to provide raw materials and services to.
And in economies of freedom, the boss can only tell you how to work and when and for how much. he doesn’t tell you who to marry, what to eat or drink or believe, where to live or how to spend your leisure yours, He’s just a cash machine for your free, private choices. A berk, perhaps, but not all-powerful.
Freedom allows for reform and improvement that work.
When governments aren’t too powerful, they can allow change for the better.
If government doesn’t control all movement and association then people can see problems and gather together to suggest improvements.
If government doesn’t control all freedom of speech and publication, then people are free to recruit support and help and to devise and suggest improvements to the authorities.
If government allows changes to the law in response to complaints – via parliamentary bills, pleading in open and free courts, and in local administration, then better laws can be made.
If government is not so powerful that it can enforce bad new laws on all people all at once, regardless of consequences, then people can lead their lives not living in the fear of having their lives suddenly and arbitrarily turned upside down in unmanageable and harmful ways.
This was how the slave trade and slavery were abolished. This was how voting rights were extended to ever-wider numbers of men. This was how parliament was reformed over centuries to better balance the power of government against individual people.
Sometimes reform like this is not always quick enough for some people, or is resisted from the top, and people resort to violence. Parliament resisted government’s arbitrary powers of taxation and the Civil Wars resulted. Women achieved the vote when a formerly resistant government was persuaded that they needed women’s’ goodwill and labour in factories to fight the Germans in World War One, but I suspect despite their preceding attacks on property rather than becasue of it.
Nothing’s perfect.Nothing works all the time.
Freedom encourages morality.
When government wishes to be too powerful it seeks to control ever more of our actions thoughts and speech in order to make us lead ‘better’ lives.
Without freedom obedience to the laws is amoral subservience.
Without freedom acts of neighbourliness are the servility of people who fear being ‘reported.’
Without freedom acts of charity are taxes levied on the oppressed.
Without freedom acts of willing kindness are acts of rebellion against a despised and unworthy authority.
Without freedom acts of heroism and patriotism are the compelled self-sacrifice of resentful conscripts.
So there’s Britain and its currency – freedom.
Britain's an imperfect place where imperfect people can still live as peacefully and as happily as their talents and friends and their luck and ambition can manage.
Britain: two kingdoms, one Principality, a Province and associated islands, territories and dependencies.
A parliamentary democracy. A constitutional monarchy. A free society.
What Britain is not is the outpost of another power.
It is neither an outpost of the European Union nor the fifty-first state of America. It is not a hell-hole of oppression of starving masses whose only hope is revolution, nor a sink of sin whose every institution cries out for replacement by force of arms borne by the godly and used at Heaven’s command. It is not the breeding ground of a master race whose manifest destiny is to lead the world, nor is it a geyser of industrial poisons killing Mother Earth and slaughtering her children.
Its sea beds are littered with naval and merchant ships and its southern approaches are dotted with the sunken fuselages of Spitfires and Hurricanes, of Wellingtons and Lancasters which enclose the skeletons of people who thought that Britain was worth fighting to protect but who did not get home.
Its cemeteries, both civil and military, at home and abroad, stand as witness to the millions of men and women who have fought in wars or served in gentler struggles to make it better, safer, and freer.
Let us honour their gifts to us.
Britain is as free and as prosperous, as peaceful and as secure as a free people can make it.
This blog exists to gather together in one place information about people and organisations that are working to preserve what is good in Britain against mistaken or malicious attempts to change it.
It is non-partisan and welcomes information, contributions, advice, help and volunteers from all backgrounds and all parts of the political spectrum as well as those who are not interested in politics at all.
It seeks to inform and encourage those of us who wish to live peaceably alongside our neighbours and to be treated equally under the law; secure in our freedom of speech and conscience, and with our property, privacy and lives protected by legitimate authority and government and not threatened by them.
