Rescuing Democracy in the United Kingdom from our current Elected Dictatorship

 

Spin, not face-to-face confrontations with the voters, is the Government's chosen method of communication. Ordinary people are dangerous. Ordinary people might ask a question which throws a politician 'off message'; the Cabinet member might reveal himself or herself to be a human being like us, and not a programmed android. Worse still, he or she might tell the truth. Ann Leslie - Daily Mail, September 16, 2004

WWW silentmajorityspeaks.com

There are lies, damn lies and EU statistics

by Andrew Alexander, Daily Mail June 25, 2004

HOORAY! The Prime Minister has called for a 'separation of myth from reality' about our EU member-ship. Nothing could be better - unprecedented as it would be for him, the great myth-monger, and for Euro-enthusiasts in general. No issue in British politics has involved more wilful and wicked untruths. You may suggest Iraq, but you would be wrong. That involved only one whopping untruth - about weapons of mass destruction- and it lasted only months.

With the EU, the lies stretch back over 30 years. I confess to finding, as yet, no explanation for the sheer mendacity which the EU project inspires to its enthusiasts.There is nothing dishonourable in wanting a federal Europe. so why do they keep lying abut it, now as in the past? The lies, Blair might consider, are one reason why everything to do with the EU arouses such public suspicion.

We face a new round of lying in the selling of the EU Constitution. Mr Valiant For Truth got his team off to a flying start with his claim on TV that 'we have won every single thing we wanted to secure'. The most enthusiastic deceiver would be hard put to beat this, since only 27 of the 275 proposed British amendments to the constitution were accepted.

There is a way in which even the humblest citizen can help the cause of accuracy. As I reported last week, the BBC has circulated a memo saying that claims of more than three million jobs being at risk if we leave the EU should no longer be treated as 'uncontentious''. This was immediately ignored in an interview with Blair, and since then we have had Chancellor Gordon Brown making the same claim on Radio 4's The World At One without challenge.

Ordinary listeners may care to note any further instances of this claim being treated as uncontentious and write to Mark Thompson, the new BBC director general. They might also copy their letters to Lord Ryder, chairman of the governors. This modest display of civic duty would be a great service in separating at least one myth from reality.

Blair repeated the jobs claim, adorned with other misleading figures, in the Commons this week. You might have thought, or hoped, that Michael Howard would deal firmly with this. But the poor chap has a difficulty. If he insists that these jobs do not depend on EU membership, the public will ask why he wants to stay. This is the big question he would prefer to avoid. A recent poll showed that 37% wanted to leave the EU regardless, while 52% favoured departure if trade and jobs were safeguarded.

The Tory Party may be in an assertive mood since he became leader, but that is not the same as a bold mood. However, he is likely to find the issue of membership harder to dodge as the debate on Europe warms up. If you can't get a straight answer from the Tories abut jobs and costs, there is always the think-tank CIVITAS, which has done the sums and concluded that it would pay to leave. Actually, if any-thing,the case is understated, since British business would boom without the burden of Bruissels.

We are being carefully prepared for an election next spring, despite the government majority remaining huge. Naturally, any Prime Minister wants to strike before the Oppostion gathers too much strength. And he certainly wants to avoid the humiliation of a defeat in the referendum on the EU Constitution before an elction.

But also nagging at the Government is the fear that the housing market could deliver a fatal bnlow to the Chancellor's delicately - one might say precariously - balanced calculations. By all reports, he had to be scraped off the Treasury roof following the warning about house prices uttered by Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England. It is just the sort of thing to alarm an already fragile market. A slump there could undermine consumer spending, on which the Chancellor relies for his tax-and-spending programme.

One school of thought argues that if the housing market is now on the turn, or near it, prices will simply level out or fall insignificantly. But booms almost invariably end in busts, and housing is no exception.

Busts in the past have often been masked by inflation. For example, if your house's value remained apparently unchanged in 1975. you would actually have lost 25% in real purchasing power - inflation then being at that level. This time inflation could not disguise reality.