Rescuing Democracy in the United Kingdom from our current Elected Dictatorship
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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
Blair wants to leave his
mark on history - looks more like a stain to me.
Peter Thorndyke, Diss,
Norfolk - Daily Mail, May 23, 2005
I know I'm me - why do I
need an ID card?
"Sorry, officers, I
don't have an ID card. I never applied for one. It seemed a bit steep
at 300 quid. I do have my free passport, my driving licence and my
London freedom travel pass, each with my photograph. I have my NHS
medical card, with its lengthy number, given me at birth, my RAF
service book with my Armed Forces number, and a chit authorising me to
wear a few gongs -including a General Service Medal with Malaya bar,
for fighting communist terrorists on behalf of my country, or so they
told me.
"I've also got various credit
cards and store cards, all with my signature on the back, generally
good for buying the everyday requrements for life as well as the odd
luxury. If you decide to arrest me, I suppose I'll have to be
photographed and given another number, besides my PINs.
"I'm afraid I haven't got a
pension book; it was taken away."
"By thieves, sir?"
"No ... well, not exactly. By the
Government. By the way, may I see your warrant cards please, gentlemen?"
Oh dear, they've disappeared. E.
Harry Gumer, Romford, ESSEX - Daily Mail, June 1, 2005
NO means NO
When does NO mean MAYBE?
When it's not the answer the EU wants. With the courageous French
NON resounding in their ears, shabby, undemocratic self-interested
leaders of Europe propose ignoring the part of their precious
constitution that requires ratification by all members and
continuing without one of the biggest founder members to
prevent derailing the gravy train.
As in Ireland,
they refuse to accept any NO votes, ignoring the will of the people,
and re-stage votes until they can engineer the 'correct' answer. Sadly,
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw dances to their tune like a puppet on a
string. With tactics such as these, how can anyone really believe the
EU has our interests at heart. Letter from Steve Penny, Kingsnorth, Kent - Daily
Mail, June1, 2005
Surely
the French result makes the £1million the EU recently spent on a
treaty signing ceremony seem a trifle premature and extravagant. Letter from Keith Wiseman, Bury, Lancs. - Daily Mail,
June1, 2005
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Britain has
traditionally been one of the biggest net contributors to the EU
because we do not get as much money back from Brussels in farm and
regional subsidies as our rivals.
According to
Treasury figures, between 1995-2002, Britain's average contribution
taking the rebate into account, was £2.6billion, or £43.55
per head of population.
The French -
the biggest recipient of farm subsidies - contributed £1billion a
year or £16.08 per head of their population.
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June
16 , 2006 (1133 days since war ended)
Death
Toll: 2500 US - 113 UK - >60,000? civilians - 25 media
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Tony
Blair should know that respect comes by example - from the
top. If a country's leader has no respect for the rule of
international law and no respect for the truth, how can
he expect anyone to have respect. Letter
from P.J.Atkinson, Ashford, Kent - Daily Mail, January 12,
2006
The
Chancellor's single greatest act of vandalism in almost
nine years in office has been his wanton destruction of
Britain's private retirement industry. By slapping a massive
tax on pension funds, now worth
£7.3billion a year, he has helped to turn
the best private retirement industry in Europe into a basket-case
in perpetual crisis. Together with the adoption of European
accounting rules - which make it much riskier to operate
a company pension scheme - hundreds of firms have shut their
final salary plans to new employees and slashed benefits
to existing staff. From
Allister Heath: "I've seen the future and its grey"
in THE SPECTATOR - April 15, 2006
Nine
years ago the British people were sold a fantasy of clean
and competent government of principle and honesty. Its shiny
wrappings stripped away, the product now reveals its true
nature: Personal greed, arrogance, incompetence, shamelessness,
rash warmongering and an inability to accept - as is clear
to almost everyone else - that it is time to go. Editorial
- The Mail on Sunday, May 28, 2006
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Prison
really DOES work
It
saves the nation money, reduces crime and is better at reforming
offenders
By
Dr David Green - Diector of think-tank CIVITAS - Daily Mail, June
20, 2006
A
sense of deepening crisis hangs over our prison system. While
public concern mounts over short sentences for serious offenders,
parts of our political elite and judiciary express anxiety about
the size of the inmate population and the supposedly excessive
use of custody.
The
Chief Inspector of Prisons, Anne Owers, claims that our jails
are now full to capacity, barely able to cope with current demands.
The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips, warns that too many criminals
are being sent to prison in the first place. And a large phalanx
of lobby groups, such as the Prison Reform Trust, argues that
the jail system only encourages crime by dehumanising its inmates.
It is, to use one of the campaigners' favourite slogans, 'an expensive
way of making bad people worse'.
But
as the problem of overcrowding becomes more intense, neither Government
nor the judicial establishment seems willing to contemplate the
obvious solution: built more prisons. This is partly because of
the perceived costs, partly because of the Left-wing ideology
which holds that prisons in themselves are a bad idea. According
to such thinking, a large prison population should be regarded
as a badge of shame in a civilised world.
Wasted
But
such an outlook is utterly misguided. For the truth is that prisons
are not only the most effective method of protecting the public
from criminal behaviour, they are also, in the long term, cheaper
than the alternatives.
The
entire cost of running our prisons is just £2.2billion,
barely a fraction of the cost of the welfare state. To put it
in perspective, that is smaller than the sum wasted every year
on benefit fraud. And given that the cost of crime across the
country is estimated at £60billion a year, a prison system
for £2.2billion is surely a bargain
It
is absurd to argue that 21st-century Britain, one of the most
affluent countries in the world, with public expenditure now over
£520billion per year, cannot afford to build any more prisons
and therefore has to treat convicted criminals more leniently.
Anti-prison campaigners are, of course, fond of claiming that
jail does not work, pointing to the high levels of re-offending
among ex-convicts. But this is to ignore the crucial point that
when a criminal is locked up, it is physically impossible for
him to commit any offences.
He
may return to his life of crime once he is released, but at least
when he is inside, the public is safe from him. There are sobering
statistics to show just how many crimes he might have committed
had be NOT been locked up. According to a Home Office survey in
2000, the average inmate committed 140 crimes in the 12 months
before his admission into custody.
On
that basis, if we licked up 10,000 more offenders a year, we could
prevent 1.4 million offences, saving the public purse a fortune
as well as reducing aggravation for law-abiding citizens. The
indisputable fact is that, according to police records and the
authoritative British Crime Survey, crime levels have fallen when
more offenders have been sent to prison.
Yet
the conjunction of a rising jail population and declining crime
causes the anti-prison brigade to descend into tortuously illogical
thinking and intellectual absurdities as they refuse to face up
to the facts. So John Denham, the normally well-balanced Labour
MP who chairs the Home Affairs Select Committee, absurdly stated
at the weekend that he could not see why we were jailing so many
people at a time of falling crime.
Is
he really so blinded by dogma that he cannot see that crime is
on the way down precisely because MORE criminals are being kept
off the streets? The lesson of recent history is that prison works.
We should be celebrating that reality by building more jails,
not wringing our hands about over-crowding.
It
was the Tory politician, Michael Howard who first challenged the
progressive consensus. Until he became Home Secretary in 1993,
the conventional wisdom was that rising crime was inevitable and
that the duty of the Government was to keep as many offenders
as possible out of jail.
Mrs.
Thatcher was called the Iron Lady, but there was nothing tough
about her administration's penal policy. Successive Home secretaries
such as Douglas Hurd and Kenneth Clarke swallowed the anti-prison
line which predominated at the Home Office, allowing the widespread
use of parole, cautions, executive early release and community
sentences and massively extending criminals' rights through measures
such as the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. As a result, the
crime rate soared.
Bursting
Michael
Howard showed far more courage than his predecessors. He wanted
to tackle crime, not manage its rise, and he saw prison as a crucial
weapon. For the first time since the Fifties, a Home Secretary
presided over a drop in crime.
Under
Labour, the prison population continued to rise. This explains
why our jails are now full to bursting. But to argue because of
this that we should send fewer people to jail and for less time
is wrong. Labour is far too complacent. Those convicted of offences
continue to be treated too leniently; one recent study found that
of defendants who had already been convicted of ten or more indictable
- that is serious - offences at Crown Court, only 37% were given
custodial sentences.
The
other two thirds walked away with some form of community punishment,
which is no real deterrent to serial criminals. All
research shows that reconviction rates for those serving community
sentences are just as high as for those coming out of prison.
The
crucial difference is that those supposedly under supervision
in the community are still free to commit crimes, as proven by
a litany of recent crimes committed by people under the care of
the probation service. Also it is a myth that Britain sends more
people to prison than any other European country. That claim is
based entirely on a straightforward population head count. But
a more revealing indicator is a comparison of crime rates.
Lenient
On
that basis, we still have one of the most lenient regimes. Britain
has only 12 people in prison for every 1,000 recorded crimes,
compared with 33 in Ireland and 48 in Spain. Tellingly, both countries
have far lower rates of recorded crime than we do.
But,
say critics, prisons harden criminals rather than rehabilitate
them. NONSENSE. Properly managed prisons are much more
efficient at rehabilitating criminals than the community. Especially
as community rehabilitation schemes are often based on nothing
more than a one-hour weekly meeting with a probation officer.
Rehabilitation
can take place only over a long period in prison, where the inmate
can receive intensive supervision, mentoring and counselling.
Particularly beneficial is the way that a well-functioning, humane
prison regime can guide drug users away from their habits. Moreover,
prison can also ensure an inmate receives, perhaps for the first
time in his life, a decent education.
Most
offenders come from dysfunctional backgrounds - no fewer than
27% have been in local authority care and 35% have other family
members who have been in prison - but the only way to break the
cycle of offending is by taking them away from that self-destructive
environment and providing a real alternative. Prison can do that.
The community cannot.
Ultimately,
an efficient prison system is both humane and rewarding. Our present
overcrowded, underfunded, derided, chaotic system is not able
to function successfully.
A
proper jail building programme is the only way forward.
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