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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April 17, 2006 (1073 days since war ended)
Death
Toll: 2376US - 104UK - >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
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It's
not only the foreign criminals who've vanished, but also any pretence
that Britain controls its borders, or, indeed, its very destiny
By
Melanie Phillips - Daily Mail, April 26, 2006
Even
by the jaw-dropping standards of government incompetence to which
we have sadly become so accustomed, this one surely takes the
humdinging biscuit. The Home Office, it turns out, has managed
to lose no fewer than 916 prisoners during the past seven years.
These were foreign nationals who should have been considered for
deportation after serving their sentences. Not only were they
not so considered, but the Home Office hasn't the faintest clue
where they have gone.
This
debacle occurred, we're told, because the prison service was 'not
focussed upon the nationality of its prisoners'; while the immigration
department, it appears, simply wasn't focussed at all. So a total
of 1,023 prisoners slipped through the gap and, with the exception
of 107, who have been tracked down, just melted away. They included
no fewer than three murderers, nine rapists, five paedophiles,
two convicted of manslaughter, 20 drug importers and others convicted
of a variety of violent and other serious offences.
The
gravity of their crimes and the consequent risk they posed to
the public were such that, as manifest undesirables, they should
have been at least considered for deportation.
Crimes
Indeed,
160 of them had committed such serious crimes that the courts
specifically recommended they should be thrown out of the country
at the end of their sentences. Instead, the Home Secretary archly
conceded that he could not say 'hand on heart' that they would
all be tracked down, 'but we are working on that very energetically'.
A
Home Secretary failing in his duty
Comment
- Daily Mail, April 26, 2006
How
characteristic of modern politicians that our Home Secretary
had neither grace nor the sense of parliamentary duty
to go to the House of Commons yesterday to explain the
latest display of rank incompetence by his department.
Instead,
Charles Clarke issued a written statement (leaving MPs
powerless to cross-examine him) revealing that over the
past 7 years 1,023 foreign criminals - most of whom should
have been deported on completing their sentences - have
simply been released and left free to roam our streets.
Mr
Clarke described this appalling blunder by the Prison
Service and the Immigration and Nationality Directorate
as 'regrettable'
What
dire understatement. Those who have slipped through the
fingers of the authorities include 3 murderers, 9 rapists,
5 child molesters and 20 drug traffickers and those same
authorities have no idea where these criminals are or
what they are up to.
In
their naivete, the British public might be forgiven for
assuming such people would, as a matter of course, be
put on a plane to their country of origin the moment they
complete their sentences.
Not
a bit of it. These killers, rapists and paedophiles are
on the loose thanks to official bungling and buck-passing.
Even Mr Clarke concedes there's now precious little prospect
of them being rounded up and deported. The best chance
of their being apprehended is - yes, you've guessed it
- if they are caught committing another crime.
This
country has long been seen as a soft touch for illegal
immigrants. Now it appears to be the softest of touches
for foreign criminals. The scandal is rooted in this Government's
wanton abandonment of control over our borders, its most
dangerously reckless failure of policy. It's
no coincidence that a quarter of these foreign criminals
were failed asylum seekers.
As
the number of asylum seekers and illegal immigrants soared
- and the Government has no clue as to the true figure
and appears not to care - so have the number of foreigners
in our cells. It has risen from 4,000 when Labour came
to power tom more than 10,000 now. That's one in eight
of the entire prison population. What a disturbing indicator
of the level of criminality seeping through our porous
borders.
Coming
on top of the shocking catalogue of murders by early release
prisoners or people on probation, the charge sheet against
Mr Clarke is lengthening. Only yesterday he was unveiling
a deeply dubious plan to place violent early release prisoners
in allegedly secure hostels - a scheme that has everything
to do with the scandalous lack of prison places and the
Government's desperate need to save money and nothing
to do with the safety of the public.
Yet
the Home Secretary insists he will not resign. And how
significant that as the latest row was breaking he found
the time for a petty little feud with the tiny circulation
liberal media for daring to question his authoritarian
anti-terrorist legislation.
It
might surprise these papers to know we are firmly on their
side. We have long argued that sacrificing the country's
hard-won civil rights would be a victory for the terrorists.
The sadness is that a Home Secretary presiding over such
an irredeemably shambolic department should spend so much
time on student union politicking rather than on his primary
duty - the protection of the public.
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Is
that what passes at the Home Office for gallows humour? If so,
few will share the joke. The chances of these people being tracked
down, as Charles Clarke knows perfectly well, are passingly remote.
The Home Office (the ministry whose overriding function is to
ensure the safety of the public) hasn't got a clue where these
criminals now are.
It
doesn't know whether they are still in England, Scotland or Wales.
It doesn't know whether they have committed yet more crimes. It
doesn't even know what 103 of these individuals - who were serving
time inside its own jails - had actually done. It did not have,
it said, the full details of their offences.
Was
it, perhaps, not focused upon ANY pertinent details of the people
entrusted to its custody, including why they were there or what
was to be done with them? Indeed, is the Home Office actually
focused upon anything useful at all? The scale of this incompetence
simply beggars belief. Two separate departments of the Home Office,
the one as useless as the other, were required to cooperate; the
result was the mother of all debacles. And the reason they were
so useless was that both were mired in the chaos of failed government
policy.
The
prison department was struggling to cope with gross overcrowding,
caused by ministers' refusal to build enough prisons. The immigration
department was struggling in turn with the shambles of asylum
policy, caused by ministers' failure to deal properly with its
systematic abuse. That shambles has allowed hundreds of thousands
of illegal immigrants into Britain, of whom only a tiny proportion
are ever removed. The vast majority just disappear.
Some
237 of these mislaid foreign criminals were also failed asylum
seekers. Their disappearance is a double scandal. They should
have been at least considered for deportation twice over.
This
loss of control over out borders has been exacerbated by a huge
influx of workers from eastern Europe. Two million Poles - more
than the population of Warsaw, have arrived in Britain since the
EU's borders were thrown open two years ago. But no one has a
clue how many have returned and how many have stayed. And what
was not realised until now was that one of the consequences of
the loss of immigration controls has been a staggering rise in
the number of foreign nationals in our jails - up from 4,259 in
1996 to the latest figure of 10,265.
What
a farce. We have absolutely no idea who remains in this country
and who has left. Even when foreign nationals are actually in
jail, we have no idea who is there and why. And we have no idea
what happens to them when they get out, even when they may need
to be thrown out of the country, because so many are now here
that the prison system can no longer cope.
Chaos
Mr
Clarke was eating humble pie yesterday. But he owned up only because
he had to apologise for misleading the Public Accounts committee
after his department's former top official had given a woeful
underestimate of the numbers of foreign criminals who had been
lost - doubtless because of the very chaos in his department which
hasnow come to light.
The
cause of both that chaos itself and the fact that it was buried
for so long lies in the fact that the issue of immigration is
still an enormous taboo. Anyone who criticizes the lack of proper
controls is promptly defamed and vilified as a racist or some
kind of new-Nazi.
It
is, in fact, perfectly reasonable to be concerned about the complete
disintegration of anything remotely resembling a coherent or intelligent
immigration policy that is in the interests of this country. It
is the suppression and demonisation of this issue - perhaps more
than any other factor - that has caused the alarming swell of
support for the British National Party, which is cleverly concealing
its racist agenda to take full advantage of public despair over
the refusal of the entire mainstream political class to bring
immigration under control.
The
whole immigration fiasco illustrates the lethal confluence of
endemic government incompetence and self-destructive ideology.
Because there is such a powerful taboo against talking honestly
about the subject, there are not votes in it. And because of that,
the immigration department is low on the pecking order and the
quality of its officials is poor. So it presides over one crisis
after another arising from the creation of porous national borders.
Forgery
Thus
the police are warning that people trafficking and passport fraud
are now running out of control, with multi-million-pound rackets
in which gangsters forging passports are even offering 'franchises'
to other gangs to run passport forgery operations. Welcome to
the surreal world of Kentucky Fried Forgers.
It
was once considered a resigning matter if the Home Office lost
one offender. Now it loses 916 of them and ministers simply wash
their hands of responsibility. Downing Street said it was 'unreasonable'
to expect ministers to know what was going on in every nook and
cranny in their department.
Unreasonable?
Whatever happened to the principle of ministerial accountability.
Instead
of taking the rap for presiding over such chaos and endangering
public safety on an epic scale, Mr Clarke has the gall to start
lecturing the media for allowing its obsession with civil rights
to blind it to the need to protect public safety. Downing Street
says the prisoner release scandal is not a failure of policy.
But
the fact is that, paralysed by terror that they might be accused
of the ultimate crimes of racism of xenophobia, ministers brush
immigration under the carpet and hope the problem will disappear.
Alas,
the problem is still with us. It is the criminals who have disappeared
- along with public safety, national identity and any pretence
that this country now controls its own borders, or, indeed, its
destiny.
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