Rescuing Democracy in the United Kingdom from our current Elected Dictatorship
|
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
|
May 31, 2005 (761 days since war
ended)
Death Toll: 1,657 US - 89 UK - >6,164?
Iraqi - >17,300 civilians - 25 media
June 17, 2005 (779 days since war
ended)
Death Toll: 1,716 US - 89 UK -
>6,164? Iraqi - >17,300? civilians - 25 media
June 26, 2005 (788 days since war
ended)
Death Toll: 1,737 US - 89 UK -
>6,164? Iraqi - >17,300? civilians - 25 media
July 6, 2005 (798 days since war
ended)
Death Toll: 1,751 US - 90 UK -
>6,164? Iraqi - >17,300? civilians - 25 media
August 24, 2005 (847 days since
war ended)
Death Toll: 1,869 US - 93 UK - >>6,164?
Iraqi - >>17,300? civilians - 25 media
September
29, 2005 (883 days since war ended)
Death Toll: 1,928 US - 96 UK - >>6,164?
Iraqi - >>17,300? civilians - 25 media
October
11, 2005 (895 days since war ended)
Death Toll: 1,956 US - 96UK - >>6,164?
Iraqi - >>17,300? civilians - 25 media
October
20, 2005 (904 days since war ended)
Death Toll: 1,986 US - 97UK - >>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.
|
December
14, 2005 (959 days since Iraq war ended)
Death Toll: 2,150 US - 98UK - >>30,000?
Iraqi - 25 media
For
years we've been made to feel guilty about our past. This week,
Britain's race relations chief did something amazing: he spoke
quite warmly about the EMPIRE. So can we ALL learn to love our
great heritage?
Saturday
Essay by Max Hastings - Daily Mail, October 8, 2005
For
the past 40 years, the dominant theme of history teaching in Britain
has been GUILT. At least two generations have been required to
carry home from school and university great rucksacks of moral
baggage about our society's failings, past and present.
With
centuries of injustices to choose from, teachers have had a banquet
table of British crimes from which to pick delicacies for their
charges. The Victorians, even in the prosperity, allowed the poor
to live in squalor and their children to slave in the coal mines.
Hitler committed mass murder against the Jews, but Britain also
massacred innocents by bombing Germany's cities.
British
governments presided over hundreds of years of Irish suffering
and ruthlessly exploited subject peoples around the world. Our
forefathers hanged sheep-stealers and excluded Roman Catholics,
never mind Jews, from public office. The aristocracy basked in
bloodsports while their servants lived on pittances. Britain was
at least as responsible as Germany for the horror of World War
I, and organised a partition of India in 1947, which resulted
in the slaughter of millions.
We
could continue for hours, rehearsing the catalogue of national
crimes, as taught in schools. Our own Prime Minister has formally
apologised to the Irish for the 1840's potato famines. Above all,
it is unacceptable to mention the Empire without blushing.
The
running thread in all this is a belief that our society should
properly be embarrassed by its past - and especially by its dominance
of other races - and that or cultural values are in no way superior
to anybody else's. We live in a world of many cultures, say the
education commissars, in which each possesses matching merits.
Mozart is not inherently better than rap. West Indian history
is as 'relevant' as European.
Even
if one lives in Britain, the customs and lifestyle of Pakistan
or Saudi Arabia are as acceptable as our own, because it is a
conceit to suggest ours are better. Many people have always believed
that all this - the doctrine of multiculturalism - is rubbish.
However, for decades, the tide of institutional opinion has flowed
so strongly against us that we have seemed doomed to lose the
battle, if not the argument.
This
week, however, heaven be praised, a chink of light appeared. Trevor
Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, central
pillar of the race relations industry, delivered a speech to British
Muslims in which, amid the usual waffle, he did something amazing.
He spoke quite warmly about the British Empire.
He
said that any nation with a history such as ours has displayed
a remarkable capacity for living with others, albeit on terms
of inequality. Because Mr Phillips is a decent and thoughtful
man, it does not seem too much to suggest that next time he gets
on a platform, he could go a step further.
He
might say that anybody who comes to live here is very lucky, because
our standards of liberty, justice and culture are superior to
those prevailing almost anywhere newcomers are likely to have
come from. He could even urge immigrants to Britain to do what
is second nature to immigrants to the United States for centuries:
embrace our history and our achievements as their own. The British,
in recent times, have been almost unique in the fashion in which
we have not merely short-changed our past, but appeared eager
to renounce the achievements of centuries, in a fashion that no
citizen of the United States would countenance.
Earlier
this week, I was talking to a jaunty 87-year-old named Mel Rosen,
at his home in the US state of Virginia. Rosen is the archetypal
happy American. He flies the Stars and Strips outside his house
without a moment's hesitation, and basks in possessing the good
fortune to belong to the greatest society on earth.
"My
father came here just before World War I," he told me proudly.
"He worked as a peddler in Massachusetts, selling stuff by
bicycle door to door. Yet I got to go to West Point Military Academy
and here I am today, a retired colonel of the United States Army,"
he beamed. "Not bad for grandson of a Russian peasant, eh?"
If
you asked Mel Rosen whether he felt that he had betrayed his Russian
heritage by embracing that of the United States, he would think
you were mad. For him, America's history is as much his own as
if his ancestors had landed in Virginia four centuries ago. The
contrasting craziness of multi-culturalism in Britain is that
it incites peoples who have chosen to make their lives here to
cling to a past they have forsaken, rather than adopt the culture
which they have opted to share.
A
vast number of us today who are proud to call ourselves 'British',
are descended from migrants of one kind or another. My wife's
family came here from Russia a century or so ago. My own fore-fathers
were Catholic small farmers in Fermanagh who left Ireland at the
start of the 19th century. It is impossible to trace them much
before that, because Catholic births and deaths were not recorded
in the parish records of that ferociously Protestant-dominate
society.
Although
most of my family abandoned Catholicism many years ago, if I were
a true child of multi-culturalism, even now I would be massaging
the grievances of my forebears in Ireland, who had no cause to
love or identify with anything English. As it is, of course, I
chose England's history as if my family were of Saxon blood or
had come here with William the Conqueror. I thrill to Drake's
part in defeating the Spanish Armada, even though in 1588, the
Irish Hastingses, groaning beneath the English heel, were probably
praying fervently for Spanish victory and maybe even fighting
against England in the Irish wars.
Modern
Scotland offers some dismaying examples of how mistaken it is
to forge an outlook founded upon historic grievances, real or
imagined. The Scots prospered mightily in the union with England
through the 19th century and most of the 20th. For some decades
now, however, industrial decline has crippled their country's
fortunes and self-confidence.
The
consequence is that opening old wounds has become a national preoccupation.
Under the Edinburgh Parliament, Scotland is in danger of becoming
a home for 20th century lost causes, socialism prominent among
them. Blaming the English for the country's troubles is a foundation
stone of modern Scottish culture.
A
few weeks ago, an excellent new book was published by a historian
named Michael Fry, entitled Wild Scots. Fry argues, rightly I
think, that many Scottish grievances, the Highland Clearances
prominent among them, were nowhere near as dreadful or as blameworthy
as modern Glasgow sentiment claims. He has been excoriated by
many Scots for his pains. Some have denounced him for seeking
to strip Scotland of it legitimate heritage.
These
people come from the same stable as English anti-imperialists
who attack historians who speak well of the British Empire. Again
and again, judgments are distorted when people try to impose the
values of the 21st century on thins that were done long ago, in
a wholly different world.
In
the history of the British Empire, of course mistakes were made.
Our ancestors did many things that seem shocking to a modern mind.
For instance, today we recoil fro British barbarities in the wake
of the 1857 Indian Mutiny, when captured sepoys were blown from
muzzles of cannons. No one now - and even some Victorians were
appalled, would suggest that this was a tolerable way to behave,
even amid the terrors of the Mutiny.
Yet
even many Indian historians acknowledge a debt to Britain for
opening India to science, justice and European civilisation. We
may find it preposterous that a few hundred British administrators
ruled hundreds of millions of people in the subcontinent under
the Union Flag for 200 years, while immensely admiring the way
they did it.
Last
Monday, I had lunch with an American general who has just returned
from a long stint in Iraq. He spoke with, I think, wholly sincere
enthusiasm about the quality of the British soldiers with whom
he served there. "I can now understand how the British ran
a large part of the world for so long with just a handful of people,"
he said wryly. "Most of the British officers I met in Iraq
came from the same store."
Nowhere in all this am I suggesting that we should deny the follies
and blunders of our history. We should simply take pride in the
fundamental truth, that Britain's past is a success story. This
country has much more often fought for the cause of freedom than
against it, as Trevor Phillips acknowledged in his speech this
week. Its achievements in law, government, science, industry,
exploration and war have been astounding.
The
truth is that we have debased our past for too long, partly in
the name of multiculturalism and partly because so many academics
set their faces against anything that might be called British
nationalism.
Extremism
in nationalism, like anything else, is ugly. But it is more than
time that we learned to celebrate British history rather than
forever abusing it, and encourage newcomers to Britain to do likewise.
If we do not seem to believe in our own heritage, why should anyone
else.
It
does not matter whether a modern Briton was born in Pakistan or
Perthshire, in Barbados or Brixton, Somalia or Shropshire. If
we make our lives and rear children here, among the privileges
of the experience is that we become common inheritors of Drake's
Drum and of Wellington frustrating the French tyranny on the field
of Waterloo.
This
is the message we should seek to convey in our schools and universities,
just as in his child-hood in Massachusetts, my acquaintance Colonel
Mel Rosen learned of the glories of Abraham Lincoln and George
Washington. If we pursue divergent cultures and histories, how
can we be other than a divided society.
It
would be wrong to suggest that Trevor Phillips's speech wholeheartedly
recognised the folly of multiculturalism. But he made a start.
We should welcome every sinner that repenteth, who turns away
from pursuing the cult of victimhood and acknowledges the huge
virtues of our heritage.
A
distinguished Mexican historian, Dr Eliot Cohen, said to me this
week: "I'm optimistic about America's future because I believe
we can continue to make all the people who come here into little
Americans. It's our miracle. Have you ever been to one of our
naturalisation ceremonies? You should. After people are sworn,
they see a video of George Bush telling them they are now as much
Americans as if they'd come over with the Pilgrim Fathers. There's
never a dry eye in the house. I've taken my students many times
to the battlefield of Gettysburg, seen young Guatemalan Americans
and Korean Americans cry when I read out Lincoln's Gettysburg
address."
The
United States has brilliantly sustained such assimilation for
centuries. We in Britain will match its achievements only when
our new citizens likewise embrace our past as well as our present,
in a fashion utterly at odds with the discredited gospel of multiculturism."
If you have
suggestions for additional subjects, or material to include in the
pages linked to the subjects listed, please contact the webmaster.
