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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May 31, 2005 (761 days since war
ended)
Death Toll: 1,657 US - 89 UK - >6,164?
Iraqi - >17,300 civilians - 25 media
October
25, 2005 (909 days since war ended)
Death Toll: 2,001 US - 97UK - >>6,164?
Iraqi - >>17,300? civilians - 25 media
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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November
17, 2005 (932 days since Iraq war ended)
Death Toll: 2,080 US - 97UK - >>6,164?
Iraqi - >>17,300? civilians - 25 media
The
Cannabis free-for-all
Let's
return to family values. Crackdown on all drugs
- Advises
Shaun Bailey in the Daily Mail, November 28, 2005
Shaun
Bailey comes from one of Britain's most deprived inner city estates.
Working with neglected children and drug addicts on the deprived
council estate where he grew up, he sees at first hand the violent
gang culture and despair of many of our teenagers. Today, in a
hard-hitting 56-page pamphlet -
NO MAN'S LAND: How Britain's Inner City Young Are Being Failed,
published by political think-tank, the Centre
for Policy Studies, he argues that the youth in our inner
cities have been utterly betrayed by the permissive society. In
the following searing dispatch, he describes a deepening spiral
of broken families, drugs and violent crime.
It
is a solution that may surprise you: strong moral codes, school
discipline, a return to family values, crackdown on all drugs.
In fact, everything the liberal elite despise.
Violence
is 'the price of multiculturism'
By
Graeme Wilson, Political Correspondent - Daily Mail, November
29, 2005
Britain's
pursuit of multiculturalism in recent decades has led
to violence, repression and conflict, the head of the
race equality watchdog warned last night. Trevor Phillips
said we must abandon a philosophy which tells different
ethnic groups they can do whatever they like then allows
them to defend their actions in the name of their culture.
Mr
Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality,
said such views led to the situation at the Birmingham
Rep theatre last year where a violent mob thought they
had a right to shut down a play featuring sex abuse in
a Sikh temple. In a powerful critique of dogmas which
have shaped race relations in Britain for two decades,
he urged people to recognise that unprecedented migration
rates were causing tensions across Europe.
Speaking
at a conference on British values in London yesterday,
he said the problem with multiculturism was that everyone
defined it according to 'what they would like it to mean'.
'It's
not a useful way of deciding what public policy should
be about,' he said. 'What it means is that we promise
everybody everything and then we're surprised when they
do things like invade theatres in order to shut down some-
body's freedom of expression because they they say "But
you said multiculturism means that we shouldn't be insulted.
This insults us".
Mr
Phillips said that multiculturalism had been reasonably
successful in encouraging people to recognise the diversity
of British society. But he warned that the recent influx
of migrants was creating new difficulties. 'We have got
to stop pretending there is no problem,' he said.
'There
is a slight tendency at the moment for people to go around
waving their hands merrily, saying, "If we celebrate
our multiculturalism it will all be lovely". Well,
it won't be all lovely. One
of the things we must accept is that sometimes people
don't like other people's way of life.'
Mr
Phillips argued it was important to encourage people to
stop defining themselves purely in terms of their race
and instead to find different types of loyalty, for example,
to local school, community or town.
He
added that traditional British good manners should be
encouraged in order to help people of different races
to come together. 'I personally think good manners are
incredibly important,' he said. 'They are important because
they create a space in which people from all kinds of
different backgrounds can meet each other as equals more
or less ... without having to know everything about each
other.
'British
tradition of civility has been tremendously important
in giving people an opportunity to mix with each other
without having to shoot each other first.'
Last
week the Church of England's first black archbishop called
on the English to rediscover their national identity.
Praising the British Empire, Ugandan-born Dr John Sentamu
said: 'Multiculturalism has seemed to imply, wrongly for
me, that other cultures be allowed to express themselves
but not let the majority culture tell us its glories,
its struggles, its joys, its pains.'
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Born
and brought up by my single mother on the north Kensington estates
in London, I come from a black working-class environment. Where
I live, the peer pressure to commit offences surrounds you. Crime
is everywhere.
The
teenage pregnancy rate is well above the national average. There
is a drugs epidemic. There are significant mental health and disability
issues. Most people remain trapped. Yet a few yards away, on the
other side of Ladbroke Grove, you find houses worth millions of
pounds where bankers, media stars and celebrities discuss being
attacked, and the threat of burglary rather than the problems
of today's youth.
I
am one of the lucky ones. Thanks in part to a determined mother,
I just scraped into university. But I returned to North Kensington
seven years ago as a volunteer youth worker and I came to see
from street level how the cycle of deprivation and crime works
in the inner cities of Britain.
The
amount of crime on the estates was already astonishing, but over
the past four years the levels of violence with drugs, guns and
knives among the younger kids has got much worse. Eight years
ago, it would have been fantasy stuff to carjack. Four years ago,
maybe you would have found one person who'd entertain it and everybody
would have thought he was a lunatic. Now I could show you at least
15 people who would consider it, ten or 15 who would do it and
five who have done it.
Kids
are carrying guns and selling crack because this drug has a shorter
turnaround and a higher profit than the likes of marijuana and
heroin. People who smoke crack are so desperate they'd do anything
for the money. And the dealers get high on the power. I know one
guy who's only 17 years old and a very successful crack dealer.
"It's not so much the money Shaun," he told me. "It's
the fact that I've got people who work for me." He can get
people to wash his car, clean his house, beat up people and steal
stuff for them.
Crime
starts younger now, spreads wider and goes further than before.
Fewer kids are 'growing out' of crime. It's why we get all these
guns and knives. The really scary thing is the young age at which
it happens. Serious criminals used to be in their late 20's. If
you came into my area and interviewed my boys, you'd find they
have been involved in quite horrible stuff and they are not yet
16 or 17.
The
estates are part of the problem. The blocks were badly designed.
We are all on top of each other. One estate was build for 1,100
people but houses 1,450. There are a lot of Moroccans, a lot of
blacks. Everybody there is poor. Over-crowding has an impact on
how young people behave.
Most
of the flats are built in such a way that a family can't sit around
a table. Traditionally, a table is where a family has discussions,
where from an early age parents give attitudes to their children.
If children come home and their parents are cooking them food,
it establishes their dependency. It gives the parents authority.
They can say: 'You need to come in for dinner.' They can set rules
and boundaries.
That
doesn't happen here. There is no room for a table We all eat dinner
off our laps. If you talk to those families where children behave
the worst, you find the kids have no rules or boundaries, no clear
moral framework, because the parents never had any point at which
to put them in place. If you are the younger end of an overcrowded
family, maybe there are three of you in one small bed-room. You
have no privacy so you come out of your flat for privacy. You
stay on the block because you are comfortable there.
'The
families with the worst children have no rules and no boundaries"
As
time has gone on, the people who hang around the block have aged
from cute little five-year-olds to 15, 16, 17, 18 year-olds. In
some cases, 21-year-olds are still hanging around. On one of the
estates, there are 1,600 young people and kids under the age of
19. The sight of a big groups of young people just terrorises
most people. This is where it starts. The kids are perceived as
a threat. They are dealt with in that manner. Put that with difficult
parenting and you've got a problem.
There's
a real culture of dependency on these estates. One reason is because
people expect to be housed and never to be kicked out. This was
an area where poor white people who couldn't afford to live anywhere
else were sent. The estates have also become home to London's
largest Moroccan enclave and to Jamaican, Portuguese and Spanish
communities.
But
although we have been housed in our racial groups, racial tension
is not a feature of life here. When they found the alleged July
21 bombers on our estates, no reprisals took place. Instead, a
child is known by the estate he comes from. Kids will fight with
other kids just because they are on their road. You defend you
'ends', your locale, because you don't want to be seen to come
from where the 'pussies' live. You club together loosely to make
sure you stand up for each other. It is an easy step from here
to the creation of gangs.
Some
gangs have names. There is the Cold Hearted Crew, the Heartless
Crew. The names are always about being mean and tough: Cutlass,
Beg For Mercy. Imagine you are a 9-year-old boy living here. You
see these groups of older boys. They seem to be tough. They seem
to be having a good time. No one interferes with them. You want
to be a man and these appear to be men to you.
In
some of the gangs, a few of the slightly older ones have already
been in prison. To the kids on the street, prison has become a
badge of honour. All their talk is about f****** people up. Violence
is deeply ingrained in their culture of 'respect'. They have to
take people on just because what is said might be disrespectable
to them. They have to be in charge. To be in charge they must
be physically violent.
Not
having parental love is one reason the kids argue about respect
so much. Their view is that you have to be a 'bad boy' or people
don't leave you alone. With white boys, it's about being a 'nutter'.
You don't want anyone f****** with you, you've got to f*** them
up. They talk about blowing heads off and stabbing people.
The
kids here also feel they have to have money. When you are poor,
you see people on telly with phones, cars, iPods. To you, the
gang is the best way of getting this stuff because the gang steal,
they rob. The great majority of them who are 'going out there'
- that means going out to rob - are just 14 or 15. They use the
terms such as 'running up in your house' (aggravated burglary).
They talk about needing £100 to £400 a week. If you
have that kind of money you have respect and you can buy all the
cool stuff and you can show it off. If you stand around with these
boys, it's not long before some-one pulls out a wedge of money.
They won't say anything; it is just to look cool.
Young
people here watch a lot of TV, particularly MTV. It shows them
cars and cribs (houses) and girls. They want it all. They don't
learn about real economics, what's involved in working for money.
That's why you see them committing some really ugly crimes, because
this is the only way they can finance this lifestyle. It means
they do 20 minutes of something highly dangerous, then bang, they've
got all the money. They have the whole of next week, next month,
doing nothing, waiting for the funds to run out and being forced
to do something else.
Lots
of kids here, getting towards 25%, smoke weed and skunk. It's
a serious problem. Use is starting younger than it did. It affects
their mental health. It undermines their schooling and their life
prospects. At our local park, young schoolgirls smoke, young schoolboys
too. They smoke on the way to the bus to go to school. It affects
their ability to concentrate. Weed affects brain chemistry while
their brains are still forming.
These
kids need all the motivation they can get. The drugs rob them
of it. So they move into crime and become more addicted and need
to smoke more. Then they get excluded, sent to a referral unit
or truant more or less permanently. This is one thing that middle-class
adult smokers who support liberalising drugs don't understand.
As adults doing it once a week, it may not affect their brain
chemistry. They also have jobs to go to. They may control it.
But these young kids don't.
They
take so many drugs because they see famous people on drugs. A
prime example is Kate Moss. She's been condemned, but then she's
back in the newspapers earning as much as ever. When liberal classes
have the view that 'oh, we can all smoke a bit', they do not realise
how it generates crime for young people here who need to finance
their habit. By not making drugs seem like a big deal, by decriminalising
the drug, they are criminalising the kids. This sanctioning of
drugs pushes poor kids into low-level crime to get the money for
drugs.
Most
children don't begin with the desire or the confidence to rob
someone. They start by bullying for items at school and their
targets become more frequent and bigger till they rob adults.
Drinking, smoking and hanging around with undesirables also leads
some girls to adopt a different sexual code. They let themselves
be shared by the boys.
If
your girl fancies your friend, you'll make her sleep with you
first to get to your friend. Young girls are starting to accept
this. They mistake sex for affection. But each and every one of
the girls has told me she wished she'd waited before she lost
her virginity.
Many
of the teenagers are the children of the first generation of single
mothers to be housed here. The assumption became that it was all
right for mothers to have babies on their own. So it is doubly
like that for their daughters. These girls think a baby will give
them the unconditional love they are looking for.
I
watch a lot of the single mothers round here. I see they are struggling
with loneliness, depression and mental health problems. It is
getting worse with every generation.
One
of the most corrosive aspects of life here is the low expectations
placed on parents. Some seem to think that they have a choice
as to whether they look after their kids. But they have no choice.
If they don't put in the time, they will be visiting their child
in a prison, a mental asylum or a morgue.
Nothing
happens to you on the estate if you don't look after your child
and that is because too much government policy concerning young
people has nothing to do with their parents. Yet every parent
needs to be involved, have responsibility, to feel anguished if
their teenagers are offending. This would lead them to have higher
expectations of their children. Compare what the well-off expect
from their children with what the poor think they can achieve;
it is so vastly different it is unbelievable.
"Removing
what it is to be British from schools has been a disaster"
The
parents I speak to do not find parenting easy. They lack information
and practical support. None of this is helped by the lack of married
families. Marriage does not exist among the black community on
this estate. It is why we have so many problems with the men.
If you talk to young people, they all support marriage.
But people here understand you are better off if you are a single
parent. It has reached the point where a lot of people who are
not single parents present themselves as such because it makes
financial sense.
If
anybody thinks that people like us don't sit around and have these
discussions, they are deluding themselves. We soon figure out
which way makes us most money. We are trapped
by government policy, which discourages us from raising our children
in nuclear families. Nuclear families should be the norm. It may
not be any more, but it is an ideal to aim for.
In
the absence of a family, school was where young people could have
gained some moral fibre. But governments have got rid of schools
that gave strong moral messages. Schools are failing children
because they do not give them any boundaries.
We
are in a position now that when a child is told off, their parents
come to the school and abuse the teachers. Children in Jamaica,
also Malaysian children, love school. They see it as their way
out. The difference is that schools in those countries have hard
moral guidelines. Removing religion and
what it is to be British from school has been a disaster. Where
else are young people going to learn ethics.
Learning
about 'citizenship' and trying not to offend any race or creed
is not enough. That's why we've had bombers here. They've never
been exposed to the good things about being British and have no
respect for this country.
Lots
of people come from overseas to Britain and think they'll be rich.
But then they find it's not so easy and are resentful. They are
alienated because they haven't been exposed to the good things
in Britain - our ethics. That's why we have a nation of people
who wouldn't do a thing for the country. They wouldn't fight for
their country. Why would they? The nation has done nothing for
them as far as they are concerned.
You
take your children to school today and they learn far more about
Diwali than about Christmas. I speak to people who've been having
Muslim and Hindu days off. What this kind of teaching does
is rob Britain of its feeling of community. And without our
community we slip into a crime-riddled cesspool. There are a lot
of really good things about Britain and British people. These
are things that children should be taught; they should learn about
the community that is Britain and what it is to be British.
But
by removing the religion that British people generally take to,
by removing the ethics that generally go with it, we've allowed
people to come to Britain and bring their culture. It's like we
are ashamed of where we come from.
Put
this with the failure of schools to give children real skills
and we have a crisis. Not all children are academically sharp,
yet they aren't given the chance to learn vocational skills. It's
GCSE's or nothing. And the failure of schools to impart the most
basic of social skills is astonishing. The teenagers on this estate
cannot speak to people they don't know - as they only know how
to speak their own slang.
You
are talking about young men of 22,23, and 24 who have never been
anywhere near a job. They don't have the academic skills and they
definitely don't have the social skills. Yet all they talk about
is money, money, money. How to raise it. Ways to spend it. The
music our children listen to says you are not worth anything unless
you have lots of money. They see the Wayne Rooneys, the Beckhams,
and their huge financial success. They see the end product but
not the work involved. They have false aspirations and this again
leads to crime.
"The
more liberal Britain has been, the more the poor have suffered"
The
way kids are educated in school on drugs and sex is also ridiculous.
When I spoke in a girls' school and used the word abstinence,
only three out of 90 knew what it meant. The fact that young people
feel they should be having sex has to be addressed. And not by
handing out condoms. When you do that, you confirm what young
people should have sex. What we should be saying is: "NO!"
Parents
should be told that contraception is being handed out. They absolutely
must be told if an abortion is being arranged, because you are
talking about the physical and mental health of their children.
Hiding it from the parents deprives them of their responsibility.
If you take that away,k they expect everything else to be done
for them.
The
liberal intelligentsia relax the rules for themselves, not for
us. The more liberal they've been, the more the poor have suffered.
Poor people don't need liberalism. They need direction. Everyone
talks about 'my rights', but there is some point when your behaviour
need to be balanced by your duty to your community.
The
working class look to rules. The rules are important to them.
Take away the rules and they are left in limbo. So they form their
own; the kind that lead to crime.
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