Sunday, February 26

The Sunday Quote

'' Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.''

Ronald Regan, in the Sunday Evening Post, 1965

Wednesday, February 22

Which is the way forward ?


To the many who are disillusioned with the major political parties and are looking for a way forward, the affairs of the minor political parties are perhaps of greater interest to us than they are to the bulk of the population.
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To that small band, that the BBC's yesterday wheeled on Nigel Farage was of some significance. Described as "one of UKIP's key strategists and an MEP", Farage proceeded to tell us that the UK Independence Party was in the process of reinventing itself as a right of centre party.Farage's "cunning plan" is to Hoover up the votes of the five million disaffected Tories who are left high and dry by the Boy King's lurch to the left, by taking on a range of domestic policies that would appeal to the disfranchised Thatcherite tendency.
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The underlying thinking is quite sound, as UKIP has long laboured under the handicap of being a single-issue party, which has limited appeal to the vast tranche of voters who are more concerned with domestic matters when it comes to elections. Broadening the policy base ostensibly gives UKIP a chance to speak on a wider canvas.
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Mr Farage's move may be timely as the EU issue is likely to have even less impact in the coming campaigns than it has in previous elections. Not only is the single currency no longer and issue, neither is there the immediate spectre of the EU constitution being adopted. Furthermore, as keen EU-watchers will have noticed – activity on the Brussels front is at an all-time low, with the Union showing every sign of having lost its way.
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Perversely, while UKIP is dedicated to removing Britain from EU membership, its electoral success depends on there being a high level of public concern over "Europe". In effect, UKIP needs an active, vibrant European Union and with EU issues sliding down the political agenda, the current level of anti-EU sentiment is not enough to sustain a growing political movement.
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In adopting a broader canvas, however, nothing Farage said on the BBC programme indicated that he had perceived, much less understood that the political tectonic plates are moving, not least – in the context of the "Cartoon Wars" - the public concern over the growth of political Islam in this country and abroad.
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In fact, having spent much of its recent history expending its energies on convincing the public and the media that it is a "non-racist party", UKIP now appears to find it difficult to offer a coherent line on the Islamic question, and has opted for a spectator role, thus leaving the field regretably, to the British National Party.
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However, there are even greater forces at work which may serve to bury UKIP's ambitions. Looming over us is the unresolved Iranian nuclear question and there remains a prospect that, some time shortly after the Israeli general election on 28 March, a military strike will be launched against Iranian nuclear research and production facilities.
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Should that happen there is equally the prospect that the Gulf will be closed down, with a huge and damaging interruption to oil production, on the scale of that experience in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War.
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Interestingly, one of the most seriously affected casualties of any such interruption would be Japan, which is Iran's biggest oil customer. With Japan being the biggest creditor of the United States, the catastrophic effect of an oil blockade could have a major impact on the dollar, precipitating a global currency crisis.While the dollar economy is so huge that it would most likely weather the storm - albeit sustaining considerable damage – the knock-on effect would be to trigger the first currency shock to the ailing euro, the impact of which could be so great as to demolish the single currency completely.
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If the European Union runs to form, it will display its usual inability to handle a major international crisis and we could see a massive acceleration of the slow fragmentation that is already occurring, triggering a cascade effect which could precipitate the collapse of the Union.
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Faced with such momentous events, one can imagine that UKIP will be swept aside as people, looking for reassurance and action, turn to their traditional parties for salvation. But, if the economic effects of any crisis are as severe as some pundits are suggesting, this could turn populations against their own governments and, in a re-run of the 30s depression, support for extreme minority parties could grow. Again an obvious beneficiary could be the BNP.
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Short of this doomsday scenario, the majority of economic pundits seem to be suggesting an economic downturn and you do not have to be an economist to know that Gordon Brown's spending spree is running into the sand.
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Britain, along with the rest of the world, is facing lean times and, on top of that, the Islam question is not going to go away. That is the conundrum facing contemporary political activists. We all looking for direction, but which way is forward?

Tuesday, February 21

Last words (interim) 2

By Sarah-Jane Hollands, Health Correspondent
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Well, Peter did make it through the night - only for a tooth problem to flare up this morning.
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It never rains but it pours!
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So today's offering from our esteemed Editor is this : "I am going out (to the dentist), I may be some time."

Monday, February 20

Last words (interim)

By Sarah-Jane Hollands, Sub-Editor
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As Peter Troy, Editor in Chief is confined to bed through illness, he has asked me to convey his interim last words to the world.
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For today, these are as follows : "I'm so ill I can't be bothered to read about myself."
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Should Peter survive until tomorrow, I will update you.

Sick Bed Ed

By Sarah-Jane Hollands, Sub Editor

It is with heavy heart that I inform you, dear readers, that our esteemed Editor-in-Chief, Peter Troy has succumbed to Norobirus Virus. He isn't dead, he assures me. He has sought medical advice and will feel better on Thursday.
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In the meantime he is confined to bed and will be more grumpy, more incoherant and generally more abrasive than usual. (Regular readers may not be able to tell the difference!)
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Anyone wanting to wish him a speedy recovery may do so in the comments section.

Sunday, February 19

The Sunday Quote no.146



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''Non Government Organisations and a good number of international donors have offered generous assistance to the southern Sudanese who want to start running businesses in the their young nation, southern Sudan, but infrastructure is the biggest problem because there are no roads, no telephones, no banks, no computers, no electricity, no running water and many other basic needs are minimal in most of the country.
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Landmines are also still a big problem. ''
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Peter Tuach, Minnesota, USA
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Well now, and we think there are problems in the UK ! Ed.

Saturday, February 18

Revolt in Blair's local club

Tony Blair might be well advised to stay away from Trimdon Labour Club in his Parliamentary constituency of Sedgefield, only a short distance from the PM's North East home.
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The one-time bedrock of grassroots support, it's members are outraged by Tuesday night's vote in the Commons to ban smoking in public places. They had hoped that private membership clubs would be excluded from the ban; there is currenly more than just mumbling from members proposing to ban Blair in protest.
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Councillor Paul Trippett, the manager of the Trimdon Labour Club and one of the men who helped the young Blair secure nomination as Labour's Sedgefield candidate over 20 years ago, is among those who has openly expressed his views at the club on the smoking ban.
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He is actually quoted in the Financial Times (not much read in Labour drinking clubs I suspect). He feels it illustrates Labour's "middle classism". Ouch !
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Banning fox hunting; promoting ID cards; outlawing public smoking; all trouble Mr Trippett, a traditional Labour Durham County councillor. 'People worry "what next?",' he says. Other parties can gain advantage here, he warns, by talking about freedom of the individual. Mr Trippett fears the New Labour nanny state is taking hold. "I think people should be helped to stand on their own - and then left to run their lives."
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He suspects some middle-class Labour MPs do not understand the working class - especially those not motivated by health issues.
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"Those who don't want to get into shape very much don't want to", he says. "I drive everywhere, I drink too much, I eat too much. That's what I want to do and what I indend to do.''

Snus law

It is nothing short of delightful to contemplate the possibility that, when the history of the European federal project's downfall is written, the projectile that socked into the forehead of Goliath will prove to have been a wad of Swedish chewing tobacco, and the David of the scenario will have been the duck-hunting, jumper-wearing, snus-chewing, freedom-loving people of a small Baltic archipelago of Aland in the Baltic Sea.
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Aland, a unique, autonomous, Sweedish speaking, island region of Finland, is about to teach Brussels a lesson in democracy it will never forget.

Thanks to a quirk of early 20th-century history, Aland's 26,000 people are essentially sovereign co-rulers of their home nation. (Somewhat simular to the more ancient status of the Balliwicks of Jersey and Gurnsey - officially 'Oddities of the British Crown')
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The Aland's elected representitives can veto any international treaty that Finland wants to enter, including EU treaties. The independent islanders are threatening to do just that when the European Commission attempts to revive the moribund EU constitution later this year.
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Last week the archipelago's head of EU affairs, Britt Lundberg, travelled to Brussels - a day-long trek - to deliver a warning that dismally low public opinion on Europe could mean Alanders prevent Finland from ratifying the constitution.
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The islanders' revolt has been brewing for some time. First, this community of Swedish-speaking Finns lost the right to fish at sea with traditional nets. Then Alanders saw their beloved spring duck hunting virtually abolished. To the Alanders' final outrage, local laws on consuming "snus" or Swedish chewing tobacco, are about to be quashed by the European Court of Justice.
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Brussels is trapped in a "Catch 22" situation of the EU's own making. Snus, a form of chewing tobacco, has been outlawed by the EU in every nation except Sweden, which secured a -special opt-out as a condition of its joining the EU, and in every region - except Aland.
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The EU Commission recently took Finland to court (The European Court of Justice) to quash Aland's snus law. But Finland has no power to change that law. Finland does not control laws covering health in Aland; Aland does. Amazingly Aland is not allowed to defend its law before the justices in Luxembourg because the court recognises only nations. So the court is set to convict and fine Aland, without allowing the island's government to plead its case. A ban on snus threatens serious financial harm to the capital, Mariehamn.
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The head of the Aland government, Roger Norlund, admitted to The Daily Telgraph last week that he did not even like snus. To him, the row is philosophical. "Aland finds small-scale solutions to its problems. But the EU model is one of large-scale solutions, and harmonisation."
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The EU Commision in Brussels, having failed to get its ducks in a row, now really does have something to chew on.

Friday, February 17

The end of week quote

''If, over the last couple of days, you have been watching media coverage of Euro-land, you have a right to be confused. On the one hand, sundry politicians, British Conservatives among them, have hailed the successful passage of an "historic act of European liberalisation" through the European Parliament, in the form of the services directive. This EU framework law, its boosters say, will slash away decades of protectionist red tape, and bring a true single market a step closer ''
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David Rennie in the Telegraph today.
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He is, of course, referring to the recent passage through the EU parliament of the Services Directive and the climbdown by MEPs, which has led to conflicting claims as to the importance of a measure that has largely been eviscerated.

Thursday, February 16

Too little too late


As the high-octane furore of the "Cartoons War" winds down, only now does the EU commission president stick his head above the parapet, finally to make a statement.
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So far down the line is he that few media sources have bothered to report it, one being the International Herald Tribune, which tells us that Barroso has declared that Europe now had to fight for its core European values, including freedom of speech. "We have to stick very much to these values," he says. "If not, we are accepting fear in this society."
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Had the man issued his statement last week, it might have had an impact but, with media interest decaying faster than the half-life rubidium-82, it has thudded out with all the dynamism of a lead balloon.
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At least, however, EU Commission President Barroso has made a statement, which is more than can be said of the Boy King who is now grabbing the headlines with his new baby and his much publised Paturnaty Leave
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But the public memory is long, and his inability – or unwillingness – to take a stand will not be forgotten.
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Interestingly, both the Conservative Party and the Commission have one thing, at least, in common – their members commonly complain about the poor press they receive yet, in this "Cartoon Wars" they have both made the mistake of failing to stand up and be counted when it mattered.
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While the EU Commission is darting off to create another communications strategy, so too are the Conservatives having, according to The Times despatched one of their number to the United States to study "how to adapt the aggressive internet campaign tactics used by US Republicans" in the last presidential election. They could have saved their money.
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Any successful blogger will tell you that to get the hits, you need to get in first, you need to be controversial and you must have passion. The problem for the Conservatives and the commission, however, is that they fail on all three counts.
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Looking to exploit new media or create new strategies is not going to improve things. Instead, they are doomed to replicate the Barroso experience, coming in with too little, too late.

Wednesday, February 15

Mid-week quote

''We live in an increasingly bizarre country. It is acceptable, and certainly legal for homosexuals to kiss each other in a bar but, in a few months time, they will be committing a criminal offence if they light up afterwards.''
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Dr Richard North - Political Analyst.
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Click here to read the full article 'Freedom to go to hell'.

Tea Time

Is there a connection between this blog - veryBritishsubjects - and a newly formed company Very British Productions Ltd producers of Tea Time With Troy?
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You can bet there is.
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Click here View to hear a sample.
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Tea time on board HMS Trincomalee, 20th September 2005.
Graphics courtesy of Donald Davison, Radio Hartlepool.
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Registered in England, Company number : 5542848
Registered office :
3, Kensington,
Bishop Auckland,
County Durham,
DL14 6HX.
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Watch this space for latest news and developments!

Paradoxes of Power


IS CONSERVATISM WITH THE TORY PARTY?
THE PARADOXES OF POWER
By Sir Alfred Sherma
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Reviewed by Rodney Atkinson

Sir Alfred Shermans’ book The Paradoxes of Power is both inspiring and depressing.
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Inspiring because he does not put a foot wrong in his lucid exposition of that powerful synthesis of British Conservative philosophy and classical liberal economics which produced from his pen crystal clear policy advice to the embryo Thatcher regime in the 1970s and the early years of Government in the1980s.
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Depressing because, as he rightly asserts, in many ways we are back where we started, as a new sclerosis of growing Statism, corporatism and eurofederalism are once again eating away at individual freedom, economic prosperity, democracy and British constitutional sovereignty.
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As Sherman writes in his introduction he saw Margaret Thatcher’s "stint as party leader and Prime Minister as an interlude because what followed was largely a return to what had gone before". Needless to say this reverse is due at least as much to the disastrous Major/Clarke/ Heseltine period as to the Blair regime!
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Although the book was written before the new leader of the Conservative Party emerged at the end of 2005, Sherman is, I know, as worried as other Conservatives that David Cameron (appointing Clarke, Gummer and other corporatists and crypto social democrats to leading positions in policy formation) has not learned the lessons of the post Thatcher collapse. "By turning their backs on her, Conservatives cut themselves off from their own history" he writes.
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Indeed I would suggest the position is even more serious electorally because the millions of voters who sustained Margaret Thatcher came from all classes and all parties and none because she understood how to put into "words on the street" the philosophical and policy insights of Sherman, Joseph and others. It was she who attracted the massed ranks of the Conservative working class, the skilled, the entrepreneurs, the shopkeepers and the housewife who have always made up the vast majority of the Conservative vote and who can see in the pseudo intellectual corporatists and technocrats (at best) nothing and (at worst) the opposite of Conservatism.
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As Lord Tebbit writes in the preface to the book "None of us were simply economic liberals and Sherman is emphatic that family and civilised values are the foundation on which the nation and its economy are built." Sherman himself wrote for a Keith Joseph speech: "Our party is older than capitalism, our area of concern is the whole of public life". It is of course those very values which in the past attracted the British people, regardless of class, to Conservatism and why those like Kenneth Clarke who attack tradition, nationhood, sovereignty and "right wing policies" are not Conservatives at all.
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For Conservatism is not about left or right wing ideas but about freedom, the individual, families, communities, the rule of law, entrepreneurial capital and, above all, nationhood.
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Those who value these organic structures of society require therefore no authoritarian structures of the State with its corporatist bureaucratic top down elites. That is why Conservatives are on the left of politics, challenging centralised and supranational power structures – as the left challenged the once almighty monarch. The dirigistes and corporatists who captured the Conservative Party under Heath and Major (and are back in power today) are of course on the extreme right.
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Sherman, born of modest circumstances to a Jewish family in the East End of London went to a state school in Hackney, not a public school in the shires! He an outsider, not least because his superb intellect was nurtured by the rigour of his critical Marxist studies and a wide experience of European history and languages (he fought in the Spanish civil war and is a Balkans expert). During the Second World War he learned Arabic and gained "useful insights into the Moslem mind set". This erudite internationalism did not sit easily in a Conservative Party where who you were was paramount and where a common sense reality was the only philosophy!
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It is interesting to read Sherman’s grounds for rejecting Marxism – firstly that the Communist dream was "a self-deception beyond repair" and secondly that "socio-economic processes had an autonomy of their own which could be influenced…………but only within the limits set by the nature of the social process". No wonder Sherman arrived at British Conservatism. He could never have embraced the corporatist Conservatism of continental Europe, nor the "third way" intellectual bankruptcy of British Liberals, Social Democrats or Labour Fabians.
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The third of the ground breaking triumvirate, the perpetually agonising Sir Keith Joseph, was also not of the city or the civil service or landed gentry but of a highly successful entrepreneurial family from Leeds (Bovis). Nevertheless he was educated at Harrow and Oxford and politics for him "was not a career but a vocation" writes Sherman.
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Sherman was allied to Joseph from the late 1960s and encouraged his "kicking over the traces" but he later regretted that Joseph too easily fell victim to the civil service and vested interests when radical political change was necessary. Sherman notes that after election victory in 1970 Joseph initially "returned to the bosom of party orthodoxy. Our meetings slowed to a halt". Nevertheless Joseph recognised that he only really became a Conservative in 1974! (Collection of Speeches called Reversing the Trend) and this was surely due to his acknowledgment of "Alfred Sherman’s economic education of me"!
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It was these three "outsiders" who (with the IEA, Adam Smith Institute and a minority of us in the Conservative Bow Group) decided to teach the Conservative Party, (the party led by the shires, the land owners and the leading financial families) the virtues of free enterprise, economic change, competition and the wisdom of the market place. By emphasising such liberal pillars in place of the dirigisme of "the right kind of chap" the fundamental decency of Conservative virtues was not to be abandoned.
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Since the demise of the old Liberal Party, the great successful synthesis in British party politics was the fusion of the Conservative values of family stability, property rights, personal morality and the defence of the realm with the Liberal virtues of individualism, free trade, entrepreneurship and social emancipation (as opposed to social control!). The great leaps forward for the Conservative Party have accompanied the embrace of the Liberal virtues firmly based on solid social Conservatism and Margaret Thatcher, guided by the wise Alfred Sherman, was responsible for their greatest leap forward in the 20th century. Indeed so powerful was that combination that it propelled Mr. Blair into the 21st century.
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It is David Cameron’s assertion (supported as he is by those very politicians – Major, Heseltine, Clarke, Dorrell, Curry, Gummer etc who led the Party to its greatest defeat in 100 years) that Thatcherite Conservatism is no longer relevant (or at least no longer critical). But Sherman rightly asserts that:
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''Thatcherism appears to have runs its course, though the ills which gave birth to it are still with us. ''
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The State sector has indeed survived to continue its dominance, having replaced its spending on loss making nationalised industries with increased spending on wasteful State education and the ludicrous nationalised sickness service. The State (Fabian socialists and Blairites have recognised) can have far more power by manipulating private companies, taxing individuals, regulating industry and passing the costs of regulation onto the regulated (rather than raising overt taxes to pay for it).
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They also recognised that in legislating for the politically correct and intimidating their opponents with (highly selective) "discrimination" laws opposition could be muted. And how useful to have socialist and corporatist power enter through the back door of the European Commission’s dictats, regulation and the European Court. And how much better to register the unemployed as being State employees (up 800,000 since 1997) where State propaganda can more easily categorise the useless as useful.
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"National and Religious questions" writes Sherman "transcend economics as major historical forces…These lessons have been comprehensively unlearned. Conservatives shirked such questions". Today we see the consequences as Muslims carry banners in London calling for the beheading, massacre and annihilation of "Infidels" and praising the London and New York bombers while the Conservative Party sees no logical end to mass immigration. The logical consequence of mass immigration is of course colonisation, not integration but the Conservative Party today sees immigration as a means of serving the perceived need of British corporations for more labour. In other words the corporatist need is greater than the national interest. No wonder the Conservative Party signed away democratic nationhood at Rome and Maastricht and is today unelectable.
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As I noted at the outset Paradoxes of Power is depressing for the Conservative intelligentsia because even when a radical Government gained power in 1979 with cross party support in the country and a clear task to perform, so little was achieved.
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The quality of the average Minister was massively lower than the best and many Ministers either sabotaged Conservatism or were too weak either intellectually or in personality to oppose and win against the parasitic State and its empire. Like other classic civil service compromises between socialism and freedom the Stalinist NHS was endowed with a new pseudo managerial tear of bureaucrats – they are with us still, some 36 yeas later. "Other parts of the empire ran on as before expanding the welfariat and its shepherds" notes Sherman.
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As someone who was writing much political economy of a classical liberal and Conservative nature during the 1980s and occasionally advising ministers I am struck by how similar my analyses outside Government were mirrored by Sherman who was far more on the inside.
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The joy of reading Paradoxes of Power is the historical and philosophical depth of Alfred Sherman’s analysis of even the most pragmatic political issue. On the inexorable growth of State spending:
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"The growth of State expenditure in Britain actually owes little to socialists.
Lloyd George and his allies played a major part in it. Like Bismarck…they saw statism as an instrument for progress and an expedient for taking the wind out
of socialist sails, unaware that its ultimate effect could turn out to be the exact opposite. Karl Marx had no illusions about the state as oppressor (but)…..
Marxists Leninists ignored it with disastrous results"
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This was also the dangerous role played by Keynesians who like Marxists took the supposed nostrums of their role model and turned it into something different.
On State education Sherman has another continental allusion:
(it) dates back to the 1860s and owed its inspiration to Prussia (in line with
the belief that "the battle of Sadowa was won by the Prussian schoolmaster")
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The three "major" political parties in Britain had 97% of the votes between them in 1950 election and 75% in 1974. In 2005 it was 45%. As Sherman points out the one consistent process since 1945 has been the growth of the State and the increased power of politicians, who in turn have become less and less qualified by experience in the real world.
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Sherman has rightly had much to say, as an ideas man outside Government, about the civil service. He notes how Keith Joseph was so often defeated by them (shipbuilding and Education being two examples) and notes how a few brave advisers (he mentions the Labour adviser to Wilson and Callaghan, Lord Donoughue) had tried to stop the "revolving door" whereby civil servants and ministers would retire and work for the companies they had previously dealt with in Government. With the examples of Peter Walker at British Gas and David Mellor at the BBC I myself eventually succeeded in persuading the Committee on Standards in Public Life that the concept of "contingent corruption" should be accepted as a problem. In other words just because there was a delay between a civil servant or minister rendering a service and receiving payment did not detract from its unacceptability.
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Sherman rightly suggests that the 19th century Northcote Parkinson reforms of the civil service "created a professional civil service appointed through competitive examination…creating a caste insulated from the values and concerns of professional communities, generating its own…modus operandi". In fact today we have created another layer of State paid civil servants – called politicians – of whom the same could be said. This might explain Sherman’s remark: "
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"Conservative Ministers are traditionally passive and leave their civil servants to run the show. They might rail against bureaucracy in their speeches but can be relied upon to do nothing about it."
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If this is the case for Conservatives how more compliant are socialists in the obedience to the State which they so admire and which has given them such personal largesse. Democracy will only have a chance when democratic representatives have the same lives – and therefore the same interests - as those they claim to represent.
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What strikes one about Sherman’s discussion of the targeted frustration and sabotage of the Thatcher revolution from within the Tory Party was the ubiquitous Chris Patten and at various stages, Michael Portillo.
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As a typically Catholic continental corporatist, Patten would have been more at home with Shirley Williams in the SPD than with Conservatives in the Conservative Party (except that the latter offered a more remunerative career). Patten’s speeches as a European Union Commissioner to the European Parliament had a sneering anti-British tone rather at odds with his Privy Council Oath of Allegiance but totally compatible with his Axis Powers audience. No wonder the Conservative Research Department under Patten was always at daggers drawn with real Conservatism at the Centre for Policy Studies. Michael Portillo ("I feel more than half Spanish") also seemed a political outsider:
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"..Portillo was actively engaged in Patten’s anti-Thatcherism before his subsequent evolutions, first to enthusiastic ultra-Thatcherism then to "inclusivity" and finally internal opposition under William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith."
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Although Portillo seemed to be making a last minute extravagant gesture of support to Margaret Thatcher on the eve of her downfall he was as responsible as any for her predicament since, as a junior minister under Heseltine, he promoted the "Community Charge" or Poll Tax as it became known, despite being warned in detail by this author of its fundamental structural flaws (that is not distinguishing between redistributive taxes and charges for local services).
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There is hardly a succinct Sherman analysis of political economic significance from the 1970s to the 1990s which was not attacked by the all party Establishment and the Chris Patten/Shirley Williams corporatists but which was eventually vindicated. From the subsidies for the coal and steel industries to the mass immigrations occasioned by subsidising the textile industry to the Poll Tax, British Leyland or the Tory nationalisation of the shipbuilding industry, from the bureaucratisation of the NHS to the sabotaging of a true Conservative education policy.
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Some of these lessons have been apparently learned but so many disastrous policies are returning under new guises. "Politics generally lags behind life" writes Sherman. Equally apt for his thesis that a democratic and progressive interlude is now followed by a longer period of decline might be summed in up Santayana’s dictum that "those who forget history are condemned to re-live it". To take one example:
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"The intellectual quality of the Robbins report (1963) may be judged by its thesis that the success of the Soviet economy could be explained primarily by the number of graduates at a time when Soviet economic failure was manifest to all true believers"
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And yet here we are 43 years later (after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the recognition of the intellectual bankruptcy of communism and the failure of the state in western democracies to deliver either social or economic prosperity) with a Blairite Government promoting a production line system of higher education with a State "target" of 50% of school leavers becoming graduates. Even the Cameron Conservative Party will not allow the supremely successful grammar school model to flourish and insists that "State" services, including education are "Public" services.
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Sherman notes that the classical liberal/Conservative "counter revolution" of the 1970s and 1980s required intellectual "revolutionaries" "but the Conservative MPs, grandees, grey suits and organisation men were far from revolutionary" – indeed they were equally far from being intellectuals, even those with first class minds. But like a persistent but tiny minority of Conservatives have recognised for a long time Sherman rightly pinpoints the professional politician, the consultant and the PR functionaries as the new driving force in the British political class: "Loyalty was replaced by self interested calculation".
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As a result Sherman sees the public mood as "defensive, plebeian, anti-authority yet authoritarian". Blair seems to recognise this by his emphasis on education and "respect" but no one has contributed more than he to the creation of the society which he recognises as dangerous and the polity which is powerless to reform it.
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Surely few analysts predicted the consequences of Conservative and Labour failure more accurately than Sir Alfred Sherman, as all parties abandon the principles of the "interlude" of which he was a chief architect.
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The above review has been edited. A copy of Mr Atkinson's full review is available by placing a request in the comments section below. Editor.

Tuesday, February 14

Troy's briefs no.10

Troy's briefs - over regulated, over taxed and over subdued
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Britain's high tax burden under Chancellor Gordon Brown is costing the UK economy an extra £138bn ($247bn) a year in lost wealth by crushing incentives to work or run small businesses according to a report published on Saturday.
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The research, by Fred Harrison and published by the Institute of Economic Affairs, shows the indirect cost of the tax system to be far greater than usually realised – a vast 12% of national wealth.
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It will deal Gordon Brown a further blow at a time when he is already under fire for his role in Labour’s crushing defeat in the Dunfermline and West Fife by-election last week.
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If added to the 42.4% of GDP already accounted for by the state, according to the OECD’s measure of the tax burden, this takes the total cost of government – even before excluding the massive cost of red tape – to significantly more than half of national income.
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Mr Harrison’s sums are based on the theory of the “deadweight loss” of taxation accepted by all mainstream economists. But Her Majesty's Treasury has refused to produce its own estimate of the size of the problem. Fred Harrison, an econ­omist who also runs the Land Research Trust, demands that: “Remedial action is urgently needed. The Treasury fails to measure the impact of its policies on the economy.”

The principle business 'pressure groups' in the UK are curiously subdued and have not (yet at least) cornered the Chancellor on this issue. Perhaps the Federation of Small Business will ambush HM Government ministers on these very points at its annual confrence in Manchester next month (see link).

Lest we forget that revolutions are born of excessive taxation.
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Left, Queen Boudicca who revolted against Roman taxes in AD 60

Left, The Boston Tea Party, 16 December 1773

Left, Charles I who lost his head as a consequence of overtaxing his subjects, 30 January 1649

Whats all this about St. Valentine ?

The profound and enjoyable (and well sourced) classic 12th century poem, posted below by my colleague this morning, is clearly not in keeping with Christian teaching. The modern English translation from the Latin original (not by us at this blog) raises more questions that it answers.
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So is (or was) St. Valentine a myth, a very British festival or a commercial money spinner or perhaps all three?

Valentine was, probably, one of the early Christian martyrs. While he was in prison, in a Roman (in pre Christian conversion times) occupied territory, he healed the jailer's daughter of blindness. Just before he was put to death, on the fourteenth of February, for this and other miracles (talk about ingratitude) he sent a letter to the girl he had cured signed `from your Valentine.' In this way he is believed to have sent the first Valentine. This Valentine was also doing what many would seem to be God's will as he was giving sight to the blind, as Jesus did and duely reported in Matthew 9:29-30 "Then He touched their eyes and said `According to your faith will it be done to you; and their sight was restored." Valentine after due process was some time later pronouced a Saint.
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It is probable that the Roman feast of Juno and festival of Lupercalia were replaced by a celebration in honour of the Valentine described above. Perhaps this is what St Valentine's Day is: a celebration of Christian love derived from ancient Pagan origins, which has over time become a series of quite quaint customs now much masked in modern commercialism which in turn is fuelled by modern Britain's cuddly feely, fluffy bunny, quality management systems, risk adverse, lessons learnt, liberal, offenders are not understood, police service (not force), pro republican, corporately dominated, superficial, vastly over regulated, materialistic, increasingly rude, politically correct, over taxed (42.4 per cent of GDP), EU controlled, society in which we all now are forced to live.
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Gosh, I am feeling better now.

St Valentine's Day

by Sarah-Jane Hollands,
Romance, Poetry and Unrequited Love Correspondent
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A very happy St Valentine's Day to all our readers (who wish to be included). While wearing your heart on your sleeve and displaying emotions is thought (by many) to be very unBritish behaviour, today is the one day of the year we are all allowed to loosen our stiff upper lips and let the outward display of emotions flow!
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This poem I have chosen is not a traditional love poem in either style or content. To those of you expecting a Shakespeare Sonnet or something from Browning, I make no apologies. Sometimes, it's better to expect the unexpected - enjoy, with our very best British wishes!
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The Art of Courtly Love,
by Andreas Capellanus
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(Written circa 1180)
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1) Marriage is no real excuse for not loving.
2) He who is not jealous cannot love.
3) No one can be bound by a double love.
4) It is well known that love is always increasing or decreasing.
5) That which a lover takes against his will of his beloved has no relish.
6) Boys do not love until they arrive at the age of maturity.
7) When one lover dies, a widowhood of two years is required of the survivor.
8) No one should be deprived of love without the very best of reasons.
9) No one can love unless he is impelled by the persuasion of love.
10) Love is always a stranger in the home of avarice.
11) It is not proper to love any woman whom one should be ashamed to seek to marry.
12) A true lover does not desire to embrace in love anyone except his beloved.
13) When made public love rarely endures.
14) The easy attainment of love makes it of little value; difficulty of attainment makes it prized.
15) Every lover regularly turns pale in the presence of his beloved.
16) When a lover suddenly catches sight of his beloved his heart palpitates.
17) A new love puts to flight an old one.
18) Good character alone makes any man worthy of love.
19) If love diminishes, it quickly fails and rarely revives.
20) A man in love is always apprehensive.
21) Real jealousy always increases the feeling of love.
22) Jealousy, and therefore love, are increased when one suspects his beloved.
23) He whom the thought of love vexes, eats and sleeps very little.
24) Every act of a lover ends with in the thought of his beloved.
25) A true lover considers nothing good except what he thinks will please his beloved.
26) Love can deny nothing to love.
27) A lover can never have enough of the solaces of his beloved.
28) A slight presumption causes a lover to suspect his beloved.
29) A man who is vexed by too much passion usually does not love.
30) A true lover is constantly and without intermission possessed by the thought of his beloved.
31) Nothing forbids one woman being loved by two men or one man by two women.

Monday, February 13

ID Cards vote

There was a slight hope that there would be enough Labour rebels in the Commons today to vote out the government's ID card scheme, which was seeking back-door compulsion by arranging for issue of ID cards when people renewed or applied for new passports.
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The government has survived the crunch Commons vote by a margin of 310 to 279, a majority of 31. It is thought that around 20 Labour rebels voted with the opposition.
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In the vote, ministers overturned an amendment to the Bill by the House of Lords which would have given people a choice as to whether to acquire an ID card when they applied for a new passport.
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Peers will now have to decide whether they want to try to reinstate the amendment when the Bill returns to the Lords, threatening a constitutional stand-off between the two Houses - yet again
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So, we get closer to our EU bretheren, most of whom demand of their citizens that they carry ID cards to prove who they are. And, while there is no direct link between our government's plans and any EU requirement, there is definitely a common hymn sheet when it comes to the adoption of an EU-wide biometric standard.

Sunday, February 12

The Sunday Quote 145


'' He had enabled thousands of people to fly who never had the chance before him - a true pioneer''

Sir Richard Branson, left, leading the many tributes to Sir Freddie Laker, above, who died on Thursday in Miami aged 83.

Sir Freddie's legacy of cheap air fares, now of course, under threat from our true government in Brussels.

Friday, February 10

Dunfermline and West Fife

The Lib Dems have won the Dunfermline by-election with 12,391 votes, overturning a 11,500 Labour majority. The Labour candidate Catherine Stihler secured 10,591 votes. This was a safe Labour seat which the Labour Party should not have lost.
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Key quote: "People are fed up with Labour for taking them for granted for far too long, they are fed up of too much spin, and the people of Dunfermline and West Fife have spoken for the rest of the country with their views on the Labour government." - Willie Rennie, the Lib Dem Candidate and now MP.
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The Liberal Democrats swept to a dramatic victory condemning Labour to it's worst by-election defeat in Scotland for 18 years.
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From The Scotsman today:
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''Willie Rennie, the triumphant new MP, overturned a massive 11,500 Labour majority, recording a swing of 16 per cent to the Liberal Democrats and, in doing so, dealt a devastating blow to Gordon Brown's political credibility.
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The Chancellor had led this Labour campaign, spending many days in the constituency and dictating the party's approach. Mr Brown, who lives in the constituency, was desperate to show he could deliver election victories on his own doorstep, and his failure to do so will reverberate around the Labour Party. ''
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A conclusion from this result could be that the Scots - or at least the voters of Dunfermline and West Fife - prefer The Lib Dem vision of Scotland to be a region of the EU and not a country within the EU. The more accurate conclusion is that the result was a reflection of a very well organised campaign with a clear cut and well delivered message.
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The result in full:
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Willie Rennie (Lib Dem) 12,391
Catherine Stihler (Lab) 10,591
Douglas Chapman (SNP) 7,261
Carrie Ruxton (Cons) 2,702
John McAllion (SSP) 537
James Hargreaves (SCP) 411
Thomas Minogue (AFBTP) 374
Ian Borland (UKIP) 208
Dick Rodgers (CG) 103

Thursday, February 9

Letter from the heart of Europe

SEND FOR THE SHERIFF
by Daniel Hannan MEP
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Last week, a group of people marched through London calling for those they disagreed with to be "beheaded", "massacred" and "annihilated".
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A pretty clear case, you'd have thought, of incitement. After all, such talk can no longer be dismissed as empty swanking. In the past five years, we have seen British boys leaving Tipton and Wanstead and Beeston to fight and kill their fellow subjects, whether in Afghanistan, Gaza or London. When the marchers dressed as suicide bombers, and called for "a real holocaust" (with the horrible insinuation that Hitler's genocide hadn't been real), they were not acting out a harmless fantasy. They were encouraging murder. And, sure enough, the police did detain two people for breaching the peace - not Islamist protestors, you understand, but two counter-demonstrators who were thought likely to upset the marchers.
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Now go back a couple of years, and look at two other policing decisions. When countryside demonstrators rallied in Parliament Square against the hunting ban, they were dispersed with baton charges. But when anti-capitalism activists descended on the same spot, tore up the grass and vandalised the statue of Winston Churchill, the police looked on amicably. I happened to be there, and watched open mouthed as police officers held up the traffic so that the anarchists could go about their business undisturbed.
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Or consider the case of the case of the pensioner who was charged with "racially aggravated criminal damage" after scrawling "free speech for England" on a condemned wall. Perhaps equality awareness counsellors had so drummed into local policemen their mantra that "free speech can never be used as an excuse for racism" that the two things had become blurred in the coppers' minds, and the very fact of demanding free speech was thought to be proof of racism. I think these decisions are crackers; others doubtless applaud them. But, right or wrong, they are plainly subjective.
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These days, chief constables habitually make decisions that are - to borrow Michael Howard's distinction - political rather than operational. They decide, for example, whether or not to treat the possession of cannabis as a crime. They presume to tell Parliament what kind of anti-terrorist laws in should pass. Yet we have no say over their appointment. The result is that senior policemen can drift away from their publics.
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I remember a survey carried out six years ago, which asked a number of constabularies what their priorities should be, and then asked the general public the same question. Sure enough, the police replied that they ought to be concentrating on cracking down on sexist language in the canteen, hiring more ethnic minority recruits and so on. The rest of the world thought they should concentrate on being beastly to criminals.
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As things stand, there is no way to reconcile these contrasting approaches; no mechanism to make the former subject to the latter. Hence the argument in favour of placing the police under local democratic control. In June, I and a group of newly elected Tory MPs wrote "Direct Democracy: An Agenda for a New Model party"
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www.direct-democracy.co.uk).
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In it, we set out a scheme for the comprehensive decentralisation of power in Britain. Among other things, we called self-financing councils, the repatriation of power from Brussels, a local sales tax and pluralism in education and healthcare. We also called for the democratisation of the powers of Crown Prerogative - an idea that David Cameron took up on Monday. Central to our plan was the idea of locally elected Sheriffs, who would assume the powers currently exercised by police authorities and by the Crown Prosecution Service and control their budgets.
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To his credit, David Cameron has embraced this idea, too. We don't yet know what will be in the next Tory manifesto, of course, but the idea of accountable policing could transform the fight against crime and restore honour to our electoral process. Imagine that your local Sheriff had to choose whether to spend his budget on a dedicated patrol in your village, or on more speed cameras.
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Imagine that he had to decide what kinds of cases to prosecute - whether to go after home-owners who had defended their property with force, for example - and that he then had to stand for re-election on the basis of his record. Ideally, the Sheriff would also be able to set local sentencing guidelines - although not to interfere in individual cases. This may well lead to pluralism (or "unfairness", as opponents will call it).
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Suppose that the Sheriff of Kent wanted shoplifters to serve a custodial sentence, while the Sheriff of Surrey didn't. One of two things might happen. Either Kentish crooks (and crooks of Kent) would flood across the county border in such numbers that Surrey would elect a tougher Sheriff, or the ratepayers of Kent would get sick of having to fund all the requisite prison places.
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Sensing his electorate's mood, the Sheriff of Kent might conclude that rehabilitation is cheaper, in the long run, than incarceration. Or he might decree that, instead of going to prison, shoplifters should be made to stand outside Bluewater with a placard around their necks saying "shoplifter", I don't know what would happen. That's the whole point. It would be up to each community to settle its affairs. I'll tell you one thing, though: people would have an incentive to vote again. And we should be frank about something else: there will be hard cases.
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Perfection is not to be had in this world, and there will be inept Sheriffs, just as there are innovative and creative ones. But at least it would be up to us. We would have rediscovered that vital principle that decision-makers should be accountable to their communities. This splendid English notion has thrived in America but withered here - rather like those varieties of grape that survived in California while the phylloxera blight wiped out their ancestral stock in the Old World. It's time to bring Sheriffs home.
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What's that? You don't see what any of this has to do with Europe? You didn't subscribe to this site just to hear Hannan ranting on about domestic policy? Fair enough. But think about the logic of what David Cameron is doing. There is a consistent theme that links his various domestic policies, from Sheriffs, through the democratisation of the Prime Minister's patronage powers, to the winding up of the regional assemblies and the downward transfer of their powers.
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In each case, he is seeking to bring decisions closer to the people they affect. Having established this principle at home, it can only be a matter of time before he extends it to the EU.

Tuesday, February 7

Unspeak - book of the week


By Sarah-Jane Hollands, right,
Literary Correspondent
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Book of the week undoubtedly has to be Unspeak by Steven Poole, published by Little, Brown, price £9.99.
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What do the terms community, tragedy, freedom, terror and extremist have in common? They are all current tools in what journalist Steven Poole calls "Unspeak" - "language as a weapon", used to head off dissent or debate.
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Whilst Poole concentrates on the US in this book, surely it is the EU and the Europhiles who are the biggest culprits and greatest exponents of "unspeak" - single market, integration, harmonisation, enterprise and democracy - the latter being anything but democratic.
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Not a new technique by any means, but one which the current World leaders love so much, that a study of it is not just timely and welcome but (you'll feel once you have read this book) urgent.
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The book's title is a definite nod to Orwell's "Newspeak". (One of the features of "Newspeak" was that it was the only contracting language in the World - less words available, meant less words with which to criticise the Government.) Orwell called political language "the defence of the indefensible, but the Bush White House is far more complacent that that.
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"Asymmetric warfare" - "the term employed by the US military for fighting people who don't line up properly to be shot", euphmisms such as this have become the only terms used.
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Poole, left, reminds us of the more familiar terms taken from the last twenty odd years - collateral damage, homeland security, ethnic cleansing, and supplys brief, blunt analysis of their wishful and actual meanings.
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When is a war on terror not a war? When it might attract the attention of the Geneva Convention, it seems - then it becomes a conflict, with detainees that might otherwise be described as prisoners.
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In a fact-packed chapter on abuse, Poole quotes the official description of the death by beating of a detainee at the US base in Bagram as a sort of accident following "repetitive administration of legitimate force".
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The verbal ingenuity in Unspeak is startling; "insurgents" in Iraq have been recently upgraded to "anti-Iraq forces" and aparently the Israelis describe their eight foot high concrete wall as a "fence".
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It comes as a shock to realise how insiduously we've accepted the phrase "climate change" in place of "global warming", or the starker "global meltdown" as one climate scientist would prefer it to be known.
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Unsurprisingly, the need to become immersed in this maddening doublespeak has left the author prone to bouts of heavy sarcasm and it would appear that at times he is on the verge of losing his temper.
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In many ways, I wish he had; a verbal tirade would serve to remind us all what someone sounds like when they're being sincere - a quality sadly lacking in many areas of life these days.
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This book will not change your life, but it will make you read political press releases with whole new eyes.
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Monday, February 6

Demonstrating policing?





As demonstrations and protests continue to flare around the world in the wake of the religious cartoon row, may we draw your attention to an excellent piece on the policing of such demonstrations, written by our friend Dr Richard North.

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We demand of the head of the Metropolitan Police, Plod Blair, why were these protesters not arrested for the offence of Incitement to murder unders, section 4 of Offences Against the Person Act 1861:
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"Whosoever shall solicit, encourage, persuade or endeavour to persuade, or shall propose to any person, to murder any other person, whether he be a subject of her Majesty or not, and whether he be within the Queen's dominions or not, shall be guilty of a misdemeanour, and being convicted thereof shall be liable to imprisonment for life."
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A police spokesperson stated yesterday that arrests would be made at the 'appropriate time', presumably that will be after detectives have (with considerable difficulty) identified all the individuals that were behind the masks. Why not arrest the offenders on the spot ?
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It would be satisfying to know that the opposition parties are firmly criticising Plod Blair's curious policy; clearly from the reports in Monday's newspapers they are simply making token comments.
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Yet again we call upon Sir Ian Blair to resign.

Sunday, February 5

The Sunday Quote no. 144




The Sunday Quote:


''Denmark's reputation has not been tarnished but enhanced. Free speech prevails, with a government defending it to the hilt. It's not Denmark's reputation which has been tarnished, but that of those Muslim countries which have demanded censorship and an apology, and those Muslims who are burning the Danish flag.

........All the Danes can and should do now is carry on standing up for the basic Western Value of free speech and hope that other nations do the same.''

Stephen Pollard right, in retort to Michael Buchanan's despatch on the BBC website.
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The full comment can be found here
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Saturday, February 4

Racial hatred


The Times today updates us on the amazingly offensive Muslim demo yesterday, with the headline, "call for 'holy war' at London demo".
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Parading banners that called for the killing of newspaper editors and broadcasters from the BBC who showed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, says the newspaper, they marched across the capital from the mosque in Regent’s Park after Friday prayers.
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There were sporadic clashes with passers-by over chants praising the four British-born suicide bombers who killed 52 passengers on three Underground trains and a London bus last July 7.
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People who tried to snatch away what they regarded as offending placards were held back by police. Several members of the public tackled senior police officers guarding the protesters, demanding to know why they allowed banners that praised the "Magnificent 19" — the terrorists who hijacked the aircrafts used on September 11, 2001 — and others threatening further attacks on London.

So why we demand of Mr Plod Blair, weren't they arrested for inciting racial hatred - hatred of muslims !

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Further reading :




WW1 War Dead



A roll-call of British troops killed in the First World War has been listed on the family history website www.1837online.com. It contains the names of 37,000 officers and 635,000 other ranks that were killed in The Great War.

It is a wonder of present day technology that it took me only fifteen minutes to find out that 16 Troys were killed in the War together with details of when they signed up, where they lived, which regiments (or units) they served and how they died.

Lest we forget.

Of the World not just Europe

Fundermenatal questions of national stratagy and defence procurement still make front page news in America, France or Russia but no longer in Britain. Such matters are deemed less worthy than married politicians visiting rent boys or the divorce tribulations of top golfers.
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Against a background of media trevia it comes as no suprice to that hardly anybody in Britain is aware of the quiet transformation of our country's armed forces - and the devastating impact this will have on Britains influence in the world.
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In recent years a whole string of defence procurment decisions aimed at making friends in Brussels rather than improving Britain's forces have adversly effected the British-US special relationship. For many of Britain's top officials, the most important objective is to be a part of the latest European project, regardless of how epensive, corrupt or foolish it is.
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Britains new aircraft carriers are a case in point. They will not give Britain the capacity to project power or weild global influence; rather they are being built to help Britain sit off the African coast with France flying aid to corrupt regimes as part of the European Union ''humanitarian missions''.
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If Britain was serious about projecting global powerand influence the stratagy would be to build a new generation of bombers capabale of hitting any point on earth with weapons or sensors in an hour, which is what the US is doing. Such a project was begun under Margaret Thatcher but since cancelled by politicians who prefer EU military intergration which is the ethos of British defence procurement and security stratagy.
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This EU first stratagy was demonstrated on Thursday when the British Prime Minister said "Europe has emerged from its darkened room, it has a new generation of leaders, a new consensus is forming,” Blair is also cited as saying. “Yes, there is still a debate to be had, but the argument in favour of an open Europe is winning."
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That is the "up front" message is of concern. The sub-text is more important. It is a toss up between Blair's overwhelming ignorance of the nature of the European Union he professes so much to love, or his absolute, dogmatic rejection of the Eurosceptic case, and his determination that, come what may, we are staying in "Europe".
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Turning to the latter, this comes at the end of what is a long speech by modern standards – over 4,000 words – where he tells us that we are part of a mythical construct he creates during his speech, a "new Europe". "We are part of it," he says, "in at the ground floor. It's where we should have always been.
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Now we're there, we should stay there." Taking no prisoners at all, his war like words thunder , he continues:
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''There is no other way for Britain. Britain won't leave Europe. No Government would propose it. And despite what we are often told, the majority of the British people, in the end, would not vote for withdrawal. So we are in it. And it is changing. And in a way we have sought and fought for. The manner in which we originally joined the European project has dogged us for too long. From now on, let the manner of our staying in define us.''

Note the definitive sentence, unequivocal in its meaning: "So we are in it". It has an air of finality that says, like it or not (and I really don't care which) we're in it for keeps. And, although he confidently declares that the British people "would not vote for withdrawal", there is not even the slightest hint that he is prepared to put that assertion to the test. Our ruler has spoken.
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As to Blair's lamentable ignorance of the construct, this is the defining issue, as he bases his vision for the future on his knowledge of the European Union of the past, and its origins – to which he devotes the first part of the speech.
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"From the beginning," he says, bemoaning the focus in institutional reform, "the drive in Europe was always for more institutional integration." That much is true, but Blair goes on to say that, although this was not just natural but necessary at the outset, "it is worth recalling: the political vision of a single market was articulated first; the change in powers then fashioned to deliver it.
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"Therein lies his fatal misunderstanding of the very nature of the beast. It was never the case that there was a "political vision" of a single market. The original design was not a "single market" but a customs union, for the same reason that Bismark elected for one – his zollverein.
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In order to administer common external tariffs, a central government was needed. In Bismark's case, this was his instrument for uniting Germany, in the case of the founding fathers of the EU, it was their instrument for uniting Europe.
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In other words, what Blair calls a "single market" was and remains a means to an end, using economic mechanisms that had as their ultimate objective, political union – the process that academics call neo-functional integration.
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Based on Blair's fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the "project", his thesis is that, as was the "single market" considered first and the rules then devised to make it work, so too should a "new Europe" operate in the same way.
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Give people "a Europe-wide programme to beat organised crime coming in from Europe's borders and they will support it," he declares. "People will not buy more Europe as an end in itself. They will ask; why and what for? But answer those questions well and they will buy it as a means to an end they understand."The trouble is that all too many of us understand that in the "real" Europe, the Europe of the European Union, there is only one core policy – political integration. Everything on offer is designed either to sweeten the pill, or smooth the process towards that ultimate goal. Blair might think that we can "co-operate" – and he uses that word often - to produce "a Europe-wide programme to beat organised crime", but the managers of the EU will always measure it in the light of how far it progresses the integration agenda.
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Co-operation, of course, is not on that agenda. The transition of powers from member states to the commission, via the "gateway" of the Council of Ministers, might need co-operation, but it is the co-operation of the damned. Once the powers are given away – in perpetuity - co-operation is no longer needed. The commission is in a position to instruct, demand and sanction. Co-operation becomes compulsion.
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Therefore, it does not matter whether there is a "new consensus", as Blair asserts. This just means a different set of people at the table, but the game goes on as before – the steady attrition of the power of the member states, and its gradual accumulation by the commission.
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Like it or not, "Open Europe" is not winning - it does not even exist. The pace might have slowed a little, and the direction is more uncertain, but the integration agenda remains.But that does not mean we have to accept Blair's prescription. He may be blind. He may be ignorant and he can assert that "there is no other way for Britain," he is wrong. There is another way.

The big issue now is how we leave the EU before it is too late.