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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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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July
18, 2007 (1509days since war ended)
Death
Toll: 3622 US - 159 UK - >1,000,000? civilians - 25 media
August
14, 2007 (1536 days since war ended)
Death
Toll: 3693 US - 168 UK - >1,000,000? civilians - 25 media
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site has had 
visitors
No
wonder we feel so scared
Commentary
by James Jackson - Daily Mail, August 21, 2007
We
were part of the same community, two young men living parallel
lives in the same part of South London. But I never met Tim Robinson.
I never got the chance.
Just
over five years ago, Tim got out of his car in a street near mine
in Battersea and was stabbed to death by two men in an unprovoked
attack - another victim of the burgeoning knife crime that was
already blighting our system.
Back
then, as the police crime scene tape was rolled away and the bunches
of flowers were laid out on the kerbside in his memory, I wrote
an impassioned piece for this newspaper pleading for something
to be done to help reclaim our streets from the feral gangs and
casual violence that had come to epitomise so many city centres
like my own.
I
raged at the moral cowardice of a government that avoided asking
the difficult questions that could help solve the looming crisis,
and despaired at our dispirited and emasculated police forces
who seemed powerless to halt the knife-point muggings that were
becoming a part of everyday urban life.
It
was both a heartfelt plea and a warning cry - a plea that our
police be given freedom to patrol, stop search and charge, a warning
that if government and society failed to act we would end in freefall
towards the total disintegration of society.
Fast
forward to today and that disintegration has begun. We take it
for granted now that police are too mired in red tape to offer
a visible presence on the street. We accept with astonishing complacency
the poor substitute of police community support offers who consider
it an achievement to solve one crime every six years.
Simultaneously,
we have allowed a society to develop in which discipline is a
bygone word, and in which personal responsibility has been replaced
by victim culture, which blames crime and disorder on any but
the perpetrator. And then we wonder why we feel scared.
Oh
yes, we are scared. There are statistics and more damn statistics,
but some still have the power to shock. As this paper also reported
yesterday, there has been a doubling of knife crime over two years
to the rate where 175 are committed every day
- that's equivalent to one every eight minutes.
And
today we learn that only one in ten of those caught brandishing
a knife in public is sent to jail. The threat of the blade has
made victims of us all. If you live in any British city and tell
me that you do not cross the streeet when approached by a group
of youths, I will call you a liar.
Try
to convince me you will summon the courage to confront a vandal,
to request a stranger to pick up his litter, and I will call you
an even greater fibber, but I won't blame you one jot. None of
us wants to end up with a knife in our side.
That
a school-uniform manufacturer now offers stab-proof blazers for
that moment when our children head off to school alone says it
all. We have certainly reched a nadir, the point where liberal-Left
politics and apologia finally reaps the whirlwind.
For
years the Labour Government and its fellow-travellers in education
and law have wrung their hands and made excuses for the gang culture
that is unquestionably responsible for so much of the rise in
knife crime.
Certainly,
it's a sensitive topic, largely because it is so caught up with
issues of race. We know that young black men account for the vast
majority of both knife and gun crime in city centres. Yet it cannot
be mentioned, and thus will not be tackled.
The
tragedy is that instead of addressing this problem head on, with
the support of those in the black community who are equally despairing
at the gang culture, the authorities allow such attitudes to spread
across the board - transcending boundaries of race, colour and
community- to the extent that there is something rotten in vast
swathes of our nation.
So
standards fall, gangs proliferate, and today's chav-with-an-attitude
will mutate and tomorrow get away with murder. Because he can.
Do not expect action or intelligent answer from this government,
masters of window-dressing. ID cards, commuity policing, or Asbos,
take your pick.
The
simple truth is that after a decade in power, the Government still
persists in addressing neither the cause nor the crime. And we
are all suffering for it.
How
long before we acknowledge that our streets will never be safe
until more police - real police - start patrolling on the beat?
How long before we realise that gang culture will never be expunged
by a government whose left-leaning educationalists and policy-makers
have made repeated excuses for systematic law-breaking?
Repeatedly
we are told that this crisis will require costly and complex solutions
- often involving the ever-swelling army of quangocrats who, as
figures show, swallow £167billion of our money each year.
I BEG TO DIFFER.
If
underage youths get drunk in a public space, they should be barred
and the purveyor of their alcohol punished. If yobs disturb the
peace in a town centre, they should be banned and prosecuted automatically.
It's called ZERO TOLERANCE, and it's the policy that saved New
York from a similar crisis almost a decade ago.
It's
a simple enough theory. Educate, enforce, and allow the rest of
us to continue our lives in peace. Instead, we have had a decade
in which Blair and Brown have been not so much tough on the causes
of crime as tinkered at the margins.
I
often walk past the spot where Tim Robinson was so brually murdered.
Back then I wrote that unless the politicians acquired some moral
courage, unless we took a stand we would sink inexorably into
a twilight existence of gate and guarded enclaves, of stab-proof
garments, of flight from our cities and even from our country.
That
nightmare future is already upon us.
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