Silent Majority Speaks
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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June
29, 2006 (1146 days since war ended)
Death
Toll: 2529 US - 113 UK - >300,000? civilians - 25 media
August
8, 2006 (1200 days since war ended)
Death
Toll: 2592 US - 115 UK - >300,000? civilians - 25 media
August
11, 2006 (1203 days since war ended)
Death
Toll: 2597 US - 115 UK - >300,000? civilians - 25 media
Our
overpopulation is a catastrophe
By
Rod Liddle - THE SPECTATOR -August 12, 2006
There
were two stories in our morning newspapers this week which seemed
at first sight unrelated. The first was a report from the Local
Government Association warning the government that council tax
charges might need to rise by as much as 6 per cent because the
number of immigrants to the UK had hitherto not been properly
accounted for. Immigrants placed a new and costly burden on local
councils and there were many more of them than had previously
been imagined.
The
other story was an announcement from Transport Minister, Stephen
Ladyman, that the government intended to overhaul road speed limits
and, in most cases, impose rather stricter limits.
Don’t
worry; I’m not about to argue that the need for new and tougher
speed limits is the result of Poles and Kazakhs tearing around
our green lanes in second-hand Ford Cosworths. But it is nonetheless
the case that these two stories — both of them, I suspect,
annoying to the average person, although not catastrophic —
are indirectly linked. They are both, in their way, functions
of what will be by far the biggest problem facing our country
in the next 20 or 30 years — overpopulation. And the reason
that we will do nothing about it is twofold: first, there is no
political will to deal with it. If you are on the Left, you are
inclined to welcome immigration for perfectly well-meaning, historical
reasons. If you are on the Right, you will most likely adopt the
stance which characterised both the Reagan and Thatcher administrations
— and which continues under New Labour today — that
matters of migration and family size should be left to the free
market and the whim of the individual. So, in both cases, the
political response is to do nothing other than that discredited
old policy of ‘predict and provide’.
The
second problem is this. To be sure, the voter does not remotely
enjoy the effects of overpopulation. In a YouGov survey carried
out in April this year, seven out of ten British adults thought
there were ‘too many’ people in the country. But aside
from those nasty moments when issues of race muddy the waters,
people do not jump up and down about our increasingly crowded
island. They become irritated and confused by the small-scale
miseries it inflicts upon their lives, but not livid. The effect
is incremental, rather than sudden. And so the people do not complain
either.
Clearly,
the reason we have a slightly increasing death rate on our rural
roads is not that people are driving more recklessly — there
is not a shred of evidence for this — but that those rural
roads are far more crowded than they once were. The average speed
one can attain for a car journey in central London is now lower
than eight miles per hour; perhaps quite soon the rural south-east
of England will enjoy similarly languorous travel.
Equally
clearly, the local authorities which fired that shot across the
bows of the Home Secretary are complaining, primarily, about an
enormous influx of people into certain already crowded boroughs.
It is the weight of numbers, primarily, that is the problem, in
terms of housing, health, education and social services —
not nationality (although that, of course, will have its own deleterious
effect). And here we have an interesting conundrum. We were told
that the British economy needed an influx of cheap foreign labour
from the former ‘Eastern’ (now ‘Central’)
Europe. It was an argument that I never swallowed, not because
I hate Poles or Slovaks but for perfectly rational economic reasons
which are now beginning to glimmer through. A 6 per cent increase
in the council charge is the first of many levies we will have
to pay for our gastarbeiter. But I digress.
If
you live in the south-east of England you will already be familiar
with the iniquities imposed by overpopulation: the railway network
which collapses under the weight of numbers, making rush hour
a misery and almost every hour a rush hour; the waiting list for
treatment at your local hospital; the bulging school rolls; the
field that was once a pleasant place to stroll through or for
the kids to play in but which is now covered in densely packed
Barratt Homes, each with a disabled access ramp and a placebo
of a garden — eight square foot of nothing; the incessant
angry growl of traffic during the day, the eerily pale mauve night
sky, deprived of its right to darkness by the street lights; the
queues everywhere, for everything. There are the side effects,
too, that you may not have noticed, or may not have put down to
increasing population density. You cannot water your garden because
there is not enough of the stuff to go around (and there will
be even less when Prescott has paved the M11 corridor and east
Kent). There is the strange re-occurrence of TB in our inner cities.
Just recently the University of Ulster published a paper in the
British Journal of Nursing which suggested that overcrowding in
specialist hospitals (in England) might be responsible for the
prevalence of MRSA. And there are those softer, more ephemeral
iniquities; the lack of community in your town, caused by an endlessly
transitory population and the sense of alienation which this engenders;
the loss of habitat for our indigenous wildlife.
Another
problem is that there are no reliable figures to quantify the
true extent of what, anecdotally, we know to be true. We can be
sure that Britain is one of the ten or 15 most crowded countries
on earth and that its population density is three times that of
the European average (excluding Russia). We are aware, too, that
the Government Actuary’s Department predicts that our population
will increase by at least five million (most of them in the south-east)
by 2036. Each year — officially — an extra 200,000 people
are alive in Britain; that’s equivalent to a new, medium-sized
city — Sunderland, for example — every 12 months. But
that’s only the official figure, which nobody in their right
mind would take at face value — the government has already
admitted that it hasn’t a clue about how many people have
actually entered the country in the past ten years. They simply
do not know and, more than that, they are not even able to hazard
a guess. This is the reason for the LGA’s sudden bleating
about the need to increase council tax immediately: the government
did not assess the numbers of incomers correctly. The real figure
is certain to be much much higher than that. To give you a clue
of how wildly the government has underestimated the population
increase, its actuarial department in 2001 predicted a population
growth of 0.28 per cent year on year; whereas, since that date,
the increase has actually been 0.64 per cent, year on year —
without taking into account the vast numbers of illegal immigrants.
It is worth pointing out that the latest estimates for population
growth are not solely about immigration — some 50 per cent
of the increase in population is down to ‘natural’ causes:
greater life expectancy, an ageing population.
It
is, on the face of it, quite astonishing that no political organisation,
outside of those Green fringes (and even they find the subject
politically incorrect and rather tricky), has made much of a noise
about this most basic of political problems. That it is a problem
is surely beyond dispute. It is not simply a case of population
density (which would be bad enough); the real issue is the number
of people in an area relative to its resources and the capacity
of the environment to sustain meaningful human activity. By any
measure, when you examine our choked and straining infrastructure,
the crime rates, the inability of any of our familiar statutory
institutions to cope with their workloads, that the south-east
of England has long since reached saturation point. And the south-west
of England will shortly follow: over the past five years it has
experienced the highest year-on-year increase in population, and
that is predicted to increase at a still more rapid rate in the
years to come.
It
is perfectly reasonable to sit in a dog sled and worry about what
is happening to glaciers in an agreeable part of northern Norway,
just as it is reasonable to mildly berate the USA for its reluctance
to sign up to the Kyoto protocols. But here is an environmental
and social catastrophe — admittedly a comparatively slow
catastrophe — taking place in a country where something can
actually be done about it, something more meaningful than a photo
opportunity or a snappy soundbite. But don’t hold your breath.
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