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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May
28, 2006 (1114 days since war ended)
Death
Toll: 2464 US - 111 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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Why
have our police lost all common sense?
Don't
blame the hard-working bobby, it's their politically correct bosses
who are destroying any confidence in the police, says Steven Glover
in the Daily Mail, June 8, 2006
The
crazy story of Barry Chambers should make us think. Having allegedly
stolen a car, and been pursued by police - during which process
he caused thousands of pounds worth of damage - Mr Chambers took
refuge on a roof top in Gloucester, from which vantage point he
proceeded to throw bricks at the men in blue.
During
a lull in hostilities the fugitive expressed a desire for a Kentucky
Fried Chicken take-away, which was duly supplied by the very police
who had been on the receiving end of his bombardment. Following
his refreshment he resumed his brick-throwing, possibly in a more
desultory manner, before subsiding into a deep sleep on the roof.
After several hours he was finally arrested.
How
is one to make sense of this tale, both comic and bleak? It is
difficult to credit that it happened, but it did. Evidently the
police believed that they were 'obliged to look after his well-being
and human rights' - hence the free take-away. Out of a mixture
of political correctness and weak mindedness, their superiors
have evidently ingested wholesale the Human Rights Act. In Britain,
more than in any other European country, the authorities are plainly
determined to apply the act to every nook and cranny of life,
regardless of the public interest.
Cosseted
The
extreme indulgence of the police towards a suspect seems to be
at variance with their rough behaviour in storming a house last
Friday in the East End of London. The dangerous chemicals they
were seeking were not found, but 23-year-old Abul Kahar Kalam
was shot in the kerfuffle. At first, the police suggested he had
been accidentally winged by his own brother, but it now seems
more probable that he was inadvertently shot by a policeman whose
excessively thick rubber gloves led him to press his trigger by
mistake.
Some
people say the police cannot be blamed for MI5's poor intelligence,
and for raiding what appears to have been the wrong house. Maybe.
But more than 250 officers, many of whom were kitted up for a
remake of the Terminator? Thick rubber gloves which impair dexterity?
And most important of all, if the police really thought that the
house might contain dangerous chemicals, why did they not insist
on an evacuation of the immediate vicinity?
The
overkill of this botched operation may appear to be at odds with
the spoiling tactics of the Gloucester bobbies, but the two episodes
are really two sides of the same coin. What unites the police
in both cases is their sheer, stonking lack of common sense, which
was once, not so long ago, a characteristic for which the British
police were widely respected.
But
it is not the ordinary police in Gloucester and London who conspicuously
lack common sense. It is their masters. Somewhere at the heart
of the Gloucestershire constabulary, a senior policeman - or woman
- appears to have told subordinates that they must ensure that
suspects are petted and cosseted, and that was interpreted as
meaning that Mr Chambers should be fed with Kentucky Fried Chicken
so that his human rights are fully preserved. Perhaps other suspects
will think of claiming that their rights have been threatened
by being offered such fare.
Demented
Somewhere
in Scotland Yard - and it cannot be very far from the office of
the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair - the word
has gone out that massive and disproportionate force must be used
to raid houses of suspects, while the welfare of neighbours seems
to have been forgotten. Just as somewhere in Scotland Yard the
policy was secretly devised of shooting terrorist suspects in
the head, which led to the killing by police officers of an wholly
innocent Brazilian, Jean Charles de Menezes, last July in Stockwell
underground station.
How
nice it would be to believe that the case of Mr Chambers, and
last Friday's bizarre raid, were freakish events which had been
got up by the Press. Alas, every week brings another story of
police behaving in a way that 99 people out of 100 would regard
as barking made. For every absurd incident that we know about,
there are doubtless many more that we do not.
A
couple of days ago we learnt about the Somerset pub landlady who
is being investigated by police for inciting racial hatred. Her
'crime' was to devise a St. George's Day celebration, the highlight
of which had children throwing home-made arrows at a dragon on
a Welsh flag. For some reason ,allegations of racism against the
Welsh occupy a great deal of police time. The TV quiz presenter
Anne Robinson once got into trouble with North Wales Police for
her admittedly very rude remarks about the Welsh. The same police
force, led by an apparently demented chief constable called Richard
Brunstrom, is still pursuing a claim that Tony Blair may have
broken the law by shouting 'f****** Welsh' at his television screen
after Labour's weak performance in the 1999 West Assembly elections.
Can
this really be happening in our country? Any taint of suspected
homophobia is equally likely to incur the disapprobation of the
boys, or girls, in blue. Last December (2005), the author and
childcare expert Lynette Burrows was telephoned by a female police
officer - and given a lecture - after she had said on radio that
she did not believe that gay men should be allowed to adopt boys.
In
my home town of Oxford, a student was quite recently thrown in
jail for a night after asking a mounted policeman: "Do you
know that your horse is gay?" He then added: "I hope
you are comfortable riding a gay horse." A police spokesman
later said that the remarks had been 'offensive to the policeman
and his horse'.
And
yet, despite this idiocy, I know from my own experience how decent
and long-suffering ordinary police officers in Oxford usually
are. It is their politically correct overlords, with their fashionable
theories of policing and society, whom I suspect.
Overkill
Then
there are the many cases of overkill, of which the East London
raid is only the most recent example. Less than two weeks ago,
78 police officers arrived in Parliament Square in the middle
of the night to remove the anti-war protester Brian Haw and his
cardboard display. Their behaviour recalled the arrest of Maya
Evans last December for quietly reading out the names of the British
soldiers killed in Iraq near the gates to Downing Street. It took
14 police officers in tow minibuses to take away this offensive
lady.
And
so on. No one should dispute that there are many thousands of
relatively humble policemen doing their work conscientiously -
which often entails filling up yards of forms dreamt up by the
Home Office. These ordinary officers deserve proper leaders who
trust them to get on with the job.
What
they get is micr0-managers whose view of policing is too often
founded not on common sense and practical experience but on the
latest fashionable theories of policing and politically correct
nonsense. The police are not dangerously stupid out of any natural
tendency, but because their masters have sometimes made them so.
There is a centralising tendency by the often mediocre, as in
so many areas of British public life, at the expense of the grassroots.
The
tragedy is that a police force which indulges a destructive suspected
car thief, and mounts a commando raid in East London, will lose
public trust. A police force that is alternately indulgent and
terrifying, and wastes time in persecuting ordinary people for
holding reasonable views, will find that it is forsaking the confidence
of the law-abiding middle classes on whose support it ultimately
depends.
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