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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December
28, 2005 (959 days since Iraq war ended)
Death Toll: 2,172 US - 98UK - >>30,000?
Iraqi - 25 media
January
16, 2006 (978 days since Iraq war ended)
Death Toll: 2,219 US - 98UK - >>30,000?
Iraqi - 25 media
March 18, 2006 (1043 days since war ended)
Death
Toll: 2317US - 103UK - >>6,164? Iraqi - >>17,300?
civilians - 25 media
| 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 |
Either
Gordon goes, or I do
Christopher
Fildes - THE SPECTATOR - March 25, 2006
Oh,
please, not another Gordon Brown Budget. Is this really his tenth?
I don’t think I can stand it. Either he goes or I do. It
could be a close call, for he, too, must be tiring. On that glad
confident morning when he first strode up the Treasury’s
staircase, applauded all the way by his sycophantic officials,
can he really have supposed that, after all this time, he would
still be plodding through his over-familiar routine? Another year,
another Budget, another statistical handbook with a sanctimonious
title and another fat Finance Bill bringing up the rear. Another
blustering speech, full of selective arithmetic. Another scatter
of small change for popular causes — research, the aged,
eco-friendly fuels, youth and community facilities, or was that
last year’s list? Who could possibly remember? The taxman’s
secret weapons are camouflaged in the small print of HM Revenue
and Customs’ notices. No need to mention them. Meeting and
mastering global challenges, as dutifully trailed in the Financial
Times. All the difficult decisions put off for another year. Steady
as she goes, as Sailor Jim Callaghan liked to say when he was
Chancellor. In the end, of course, he capsized. At least his successor
has remained afloat.
Gordon
Brown could claim that this has been his achievement. Every previous
Labour chancellor — and there were seven of them — had
run into a crisis and was blown (as Sailor Jim would say) off
course. Then, on one black and breezy Wednesday, it happened to
a Conservative chancellor, and the pound and his policies sank
with all hands. Never mind that these had been Labour’s policies,
too. The new Shadow Chancellor spotted his chance. If this crisis
had shown the Conservatives up as financial and economic incompetents,
he could put himself forward as Labour’s new model crisis-free
Chancellor. He prepared for the role. Prudence would be his guiding
light and leading lady. His first act at the Treasury was to put
monetary policy out to contract to the Bank of England. He limited
himself to his predecessor’s spending plans. He made rules
of his own, setting limits to his borrowings. All this was designed
to establish his credit, and so, indeed, it did — but not
just to win himself an Eagle Scout’s badge from the financial
markets. This credit was there to be used in support of good causes,
one of which, naturally enough, was to win the next election.
In
his third year he turned the taps full on, and flooded the public
services — most of all the National Health Service —
with money. The election was won, and he must have expected his
reward. Surely the Prime Minister would be as good as his word
and move over? This promise to pay, though, was and still is a
cheque with no date on it.
Now,
six budgets later and with another election behind him, the Chancellor
is still left to wait in expectation, and in all this time the
taps have been running. He may yet be the first Chancellor to
see public spending double under his stewardship. Year after year,
he has had to borrow more than he had bargained for. (This time
he has come out more or less on target, and it was his estimate
for growth that missed by miles.) His trouble now is to demonstrate
what all this money has bought. Much of it — most of it —
amounts to running on the spot. The public sector has its own
inflation rate, which is higher than ordinary people’s, just
as its productivity is lower. His critics would say that he has
been shifting resources into the less productive parts of the
economy. A betting man might say that he has doubled up on losers.
That is an expensive way to bet, and the odds will now begin to
shift against him.
Ruth
Lea is an old Treasury hand whose criticism has been known to
needle this Chancellor. When his grumblings reached the Institute
of Directors, she was pushed out of her job there and her boss
was coincidentally rewarded with a knighthood. Now she is director
of the Centre for Policy Studies, and still needling. She calls
him a spender who has gone from famine to feast and is moving
back to famine. His review of public spending has been put off
from this year to next, and no wonder. She says that on his own
estimates, even if spending on health and education slows down,
spending on other services will be hard pressed to grow at all.
That will have painful effects. Already Savij Kutz, the Hungarian
bogeyman, is sinking his teeth into overspent hospitals. Just
wait until he gets going.
Behind
that facade of glowering assurance, Gordon Brown must wonder how
wise he has been to stay on and on at the Treasury. Of course,
he has made it his power base, a great Whitehall fortress now
expanded to accommodate the taxmen. At the same time it has made
him a one-subject minister, and his off-subject ventures —
proposing a new bank holiday, for instance — can look staged
and awkward. Sailor Jim advised Nigel Lawson to become Foreign
Secretary: ‘It’s a doddle.’ Mr Brown, it is true,
does not have much time for foreigners, unless they are poor and
a long way away — when Europe’s finance ministers meet,
he prefers to stay at home and send Dawn Primarolo — but
these instincts might prove salutary at the Foreign Office. Its
last one-subject Secretary of State was Anthony Eden, and what
a disastrous prime minister he made.
Sooner
or later — and sooner, for choice — some Chancellor
will have to tackle the Treasury’s unfinished business. Next
year’s review of spending is only the start of it. Carefully
kept away from the Budget arithmetic is the huge prospective liability
for public sector pensions. If they had to be funded, as private
pension schemes are, they would double the National Debt. As it
is, they are a tax on posterity, and the cost has gone up as the
public sector has swollen. We already work for the taxman for
the first five months of each year, and from now on this sentence
of forced labour will increase. More and more our economy has
come to look like its neighbours on the Continent — high
public spending, high borrowing, high taxing. Until now he has
held them up to us as warnings. He himself came to office as a
tax reformer, taking an opportunity which came, he said, once
in a generation. What he has done with it is to make the system
far more complicated and intrusive, drawing more and more people
more tightly into the net. Someone else will have to disentangle
them. Let this be the last of the Gordon Brown Budgets.
He
might fairly retort that what is sauce for the Chancellor is sauce
for the commentator, and that he will move over when I do. We
might even collide on the way to the exit. Keep watching this
space.
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