The Big Ask

Here it is in all its glorious simplicity.

A heartfelt, polite and non-partisan request that the Prime Minister, the Right Honourable Gordon Brown MP, should offer his resignation to her Majesty The Queen forthwith: delivered right to his door.

Now, who'd want to sign such a petition?

Happy Saint George's Day

... for England must be worth a lot, because it costs a lot. Its government told us so yesterday in the Budget.
And did any of you get a bud yesterday? One single bud? Anyone? Me, neither.

This is my sheepish return to duty at Citizens and Neighbours.
Apologies to anyone out there who had had higher hopes of this that I've eared recently.
Blogwise I've been selfish - letting off too much steam at the ranting site and so nothing's got done here at CAN. Let me start to fix it, a bit.

So what's new?

Sue recommends that we go for this Big Brother and Freedom of Speech petition:

"We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to stop the proposed legislation requiring Facebook to monitor users' contacts."

Raedwald wants us to stick our necks out and our noses into this consultation:
This consultation covers proposals to amend...the Accounts and Audit Regulations 2003 to extend the requirement on public bodies when producing their statement of accounts to include additional information about the remuneration of senior officer. It seeks views on:
A proposed level of disclosure for senior officers in terms of salary, bonuses, additional payments, benefits in kind, compensation/ex-gratia payments, and pension entitlements.
A definition of 'senior'.
A proposed change to the way staff earning over £50,000 is reported, breaking this down into £5,000 bandings in place of the existing £10,000 banding.
Get those fat cats of the trough, or something - and we've got to 22 June 2009 to create a stink.

And The UK Libertarian Party wants us to send the shirt off our backs to Ten Downing Street with a commentary on the latest Budget. And here's the Facebook page, courtesy of Old Holborn.

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The Triumph of the Political Class

Knowledge is power and power is a weapon, as well as a goal, of war.

The Triumph of the Political Class by Peter Oborne is a very fine weapon indeed, as it is a rich source of truth about the present and recent past of British politics.

A political journalist and author, Oborne has anatomized our new ruling caste: their origins and beliefs; their activities, inter-relations and ways of life, and what this all means for good government. It means death.

Bullet-points now for the skim-reader, about the political class, hereinafter referred to as the PC;

# What we’ve got here is a self-perpetuating elite of lifelong, full-time politicians who are usually university educated and have no business or military experience and who subsist pretty much as financial beneficiaries of the State and the State’s clients and supporters (such as the mainstream media, the subsidized arts and academia, and certain favoured State-supplying private contractors and think-tanks.) They have no interests inside civil society and none within politics other than the accumulation and use of power for self and partisan – or factional – gain.

# The PC has corrupted almost all the institutions of government and society that once were anatomized as ‘The Establishment’: the formerly neutral Civil Service, the security services, the judiciary and rule of law, parliament and the independent press, and has even muscled into the Royal Family’s private grief for partisan advantage.

# It has blurred the distinctions between the private spheres of family, charity and commerce and merged them into public power and the institutions of government and on top of this it has broken down the separation of party political interests and the State and the State’s resources.

#Why?Political party membership has tumbled since 1945 for 20% of the population to a few hundred thousand now. Political parties need media resources to persuade would-be voters as the mass doorstep canvass has become a thing of the past. This requires money and control over the media.

#What?The PC believes in the overwhelmingly beneficial power of government to improve the lives of individuals and nations – if government given enough power and freedom to use it at will.

#Who? The 1960’s university Marxists plus the Age of Aquarius radical individualists have moved into politics to effect their ends peacefully but dishonesty via the conquest and subordination of traditional national institutions to their ends alone.

Some impatience with the old establishment began under the Thatcher Tories’ time in office – remember her liking for Yes Minister?, and so some boundaries began to be eroded or overleapt in her eagerness to get the country working and prosperous again, and to win the Cold War. However, this was as nothing compared with the monsoon of subversion and the embedding of partisan ‘advisers’ throughout Whitehall when New Labour came to power.

They have no income of their own apart from what they can make in government and from its clients so they can’t really do the honourable thing when they are proved to be wrong or dishonest and resign – so the Civil Service gets to carry the can instead.

#How?

>Corruption of the Civil Service’s upper echelons from being professional and permanent governmental advisors to becoming partisans of the ruling party’s policies. Subordination of Cabinet Secretaries’ impartiality to New Labour’s factional needs, for example, began much from the start of Tony Blair’s first term of office.

>Creating a political and media elite who feed each other – exciting initiatives announced in newspapers whose circulations rise in return for support up to and including the whitewashing of corruption and the smearing of honest officials and whistleblowers. The press was right at the head of the queue to trash the reputation of the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner Elizabeth Filkin as she battled and tried to punish MPs’ corruption. She was ousted in part by the press and in part by briefings made by senior figures in all three major political parties.

>Bringing partisan outsiders (‘advisors’) into government – and empowering them to issue orders to the Civil Service.

>Muscling in on the judiciary.

>Absolving a tame and well-paid Parliament from the consequences of improper conduct and persecuting the upholders of its honour and propriety.

>Using military and political intelligence data for purposes of public persuasion.

>Well-paid movement available and unchecked between politics, Civil Service, private companies that water at the public trough, plus quangos and think-tank/’charities’ that support the statist party line. Bankers’ bonuses, anyone? Polly Toynbee at Guardian and BBC.

> Absorbing the leadership of all three national parties into a comfortable club wherein mutual support and shared values set them against their own core supporters and the national interest. Creating and fighting over a soggy centre ground where, for example, the class interests of the working classes or the middle classes are frustrated by the sheer lack of competition between party leaders and their policies.

Results.

# Democracy becomes a meaningless sham; a game of musical chairs played by a small group of friends where everyone gets a go at the prizes in return for not offering the voters distinct choices that would exclude the other players for a parliament or three. Call them the NewLabDemoServatives.

# Government is incompetent: unquestioned by an investigative media which has now become government’s poodle, and unchecked in folly and haste by a neutered Civil Service and a weakened judiciary, it spends money like water on projects that achieve little or no good, often do great harm, and managed to make a just war against undoubted tyrants and the foulest ideological and existential assailants on Earth both unpopular and Britain’s part in it unappreciated by the bulk of a (briefly-indoctrinated) British public.

# People are looking for something else; something that the deracinated, internationalist corrupted, invaded and subverted gentlemen’s club of Westminster Whitehall and their arts, media and academic cheerleaders and apologists and their refuses to address.

In a recession which is morphing into a depression, what people turn to might not be very nice at all.

And the PC is clueless when its policies lead directly to something other than the heirs of Churchill and Atlee.

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Today's the day: Modern Liberty

Modern Liberty is happening today nationwide.

I don't know what's going to come of it but it is a major event aimed at protecting and promoting freedom in the UKGB.

Some famous names from Right and Left alike are about to duke it out in cities all over the country and on-line - about which more here.

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QUID PRO CUSTARD

Who shall guard against the guardians? If our rulers are over mighty and we watch them, then who is looking sceptically at those of us who watch them- and the mighty ones themselves?
Here I list the sceptics, the doubters, the contrarians in our ranks - and those who try to keep us on the strait and narrow.
It's not always comfortable having troublemakers on board; those who snipe at our dearest-held prejudices and who doubt our established positions, but someone needs to keep us awake.
And wasn't Churchill, the greatest conspiracy theorist and troublemaker of recent times, also the best our nation could produce?

Number watch. Sceptical, cynical, scientific; unwilling to accept 87% of all statistics and utterly unwilling to take the Mighty's word for it until it's as close to proven as senses and reason can achieve. Also lists the absurd laws that govern the cock-up theory of life here. Main page/menu here.

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THE ENVIRONMENT

There is a realm containing all living things that surrounds all living beings and binds the world together.

It is the environment.

Mankind’s activities do cause harm, and Britain has a long history of cleaning up the mess we have made, such as the Clean Air Act and acts of preservation such as the National Trust. But is all the news bad, and is all the bad news true? Look in this page for people concerned with both the dark side and the light side of the environment.

Man-made climate change - formerly known as 'Global Warming' is continually advertised, discussed, and set at the centre of an international campaign to combat the supposed menace of anthropogenic climate change.
But the science is not fixed and permanent and uncontroversial.
Far from it.
Here are some free voices who do not hold that the sky is falling.

A list from Google of those who stand up against the political consensus on the science of ACC is here.

A Wikipedia list of scientists who dissent from the consensus is here.

A personal blog of ACC open-mindedness with many useful articles and links is here.

From Number Watch, a complete list of things caused by Global Warming.

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Defence Training Review : Forty shillings but no drum?

Under the Defence Training Review, the Government is concentrating much of its service and support units’ training into a smaller number of training sites which will be administered by private companies. Many of these training roles are to be relocated to a site in Wales, bless them, but the review itself is proving controversial not just because of potential and real job losses.

CAN isn’t covering this from the employment angle even though it is right and proper that the unions should seek to protect their members’ livelihoods. The right to combine into unions is one of our nation’s hard-won rights and freedoms that our armed services are, in some part, fighting to protect today.

Do you know how the Taliban conduct public sector pays negotiations?

Me neither, but I bet it’d give even my flinty former Thatcherite heart a warm feeling nostalgia for the expression ‘fight the cuts.’

Here’s what some trades unionists say, for information.

Now, here’s what some of the top brass say in three slow-loading pages.

I’m an old-style privatizer myself but fifteen years of experience of the ‘Peace Dividend’ and eleven of them under this government’s private finance initiatives tend me to suspect that this may essentially be a cost-cutting exercise and an exercise in constituency-based political influence.

And I don’t feel one jot better protected from what I’ve read about it so far.

I’m hoping to get some specific contacts for those who wish to be active in organised protest against these moves, and this post is therefore a work in progress, but in the meantime, here is the MOD’s contact page.

I’ll update as soon as I get more information.

Additional

Freedom of speech isn't merely a pie-in-the-sky 'human right' conjured up by political philosophers to give activists something to do. It’s the product of centuries of political supply and demand in response - in part at least - to public sector corruption, jobbery, and the perils from secret government.

CAN has publicised the plight of public-sector military trainers and their campaign to keep jobs local to them, and also within the public sector. Oddly enough, I find myself in sympathy with them on this one, but that’s not the issue here.

What is the issue is that the MoD is trying – according to the union concerned – to prevent them from publicizing their cause. See an article about the general issue of the campaign here.

An anti-secrecy watchdog, Index on Censorship picks up this story here.

Now I’m all for operational secrecy in military and intelligence matters; this country’s security must come above all else in my opinion, but may I remind readers on the freedom-loving Right that it was official secrecy that let the pre-war appeasers have their way as Britain and its Empire disarmed - despite the imperial government’s knowledge of what the Axis Powers were up to?

So these people are campaigning to keep their jobs where they are rather than having them exported to Labour Heartlands Wales on the one hand, and also making the twin claims that the whole exercise is costing the taxpayers way too much and may be threatening national security.

I don’t know whether they are right and wrong about cost and national security, but hushing them up isn’t going to do much for financial honesty or our country’s safety. Plus it is a democratic right – long established in law – to protest against threats to one’s livelihood.

I daresay that they could do with some moral support – and any other kind you might like to offer.

Back to DEFENCE OF THE REALM.

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