Silent Majority Speaks
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
Return
of the class warrior
Prescott
wants to make sure that if one kid can't have something, nobody
else will get it either. We might laugh at this fool, but Britain
should be fearful of him getting his way, says Max Hastings in
the Daily Mail
December
20, 2005
The
state of John Prescott worries me. Is he eating sensibly and taking
enough exercise? Is his nice wife Pauline careful to stop him
driving too fast? Do his security men keep a watchful arm ready,
in case he slips on the ice on a frosty morning?
The
welfare of the Deputy Prime Minister should be a source of concern
to all of us who care about Britain's heritage. He is an exhibit
who deserves pride of place in any museum,a cage to himself in
any zoo, a superb specimen of that legendary Labour Party beast:
the class warrior.
Not
for Mr Prescott namby-pamby, airy-fairy 21st century claptrap
about the classless society, the land of equal opportunity where
one man - correction, one person - is as good as another and New
Labour's big tent has seats for all. He is one of the old breed,
true believers, who look on politics as a perpetual struggle between
privileged, stuck-up nancy-boys from posh schools with silly voices
and the sons and daughters of toil who call a spade a spade, a
pint a pint and Peter Mandelson a ... no, sorry, not in a family
newspaper.
Most
of the time, Mr Prescott is kept on his ball and chain in the
Cabinet Office, forbidden to cock his leg on carpets. But every
now and again he escapes, as he has this week, and a trail of
puddles marks his passage.
Stitch-up
Just
as Tony Blair is striving to save a cherished education reform
programme from his own Left-wing, the Deputy Prime Minister has
given an interview making plain that he thinks the whole thing
is tosh, a stitch-up to benefit the middle-class at the expense
of honest workers.
Prezza
prejudice
Comment
- Daily Mail, Dec. 20, 2005
If
proof were ever needed that the Labour leopard - despite
8 years of Tony Blair - hasn't really changed its spots,
analyse the remarks this weekend by John Prescott. According
to this ex-shop steward, Tories represent class war and
Mr Blair's new Education Bill must be destroyed because
it will effectively mean the return of the 11+ which Mr
Prescott hates.
Britain
class-ridden? Where has Two Jags been for the last 25
years? A woman he despises, a grammar school girl from
a corner shop in Grantham, did more to dismantle this
country's class divisions than any Labour government,
by lifting aspirations of millions through the sale of
council houses.
In
the process she shattered Labour's exploitation of its
housing estate power base and created a social revolution
which saw an expansion of middle classes. Her deregulation
of the once-rarified City of London enabled talent from
all walks of life to make fortunes in the Square Mile.
By smashing unions and state industrial dinosaurs, she
turned Britain into a truly entrepreneurial society.
This
explosion in social mobility appears to have passed Mr
Prescott by. His class-war rant will appear incomprehensible
to most young people who see a world where the sky's the
limit if they have the ability. His opposition to educational
reform will be seen as a betrayal of bright children stuck
in sink schools, which leads to fewer working class sons
and daughters going to university today that in Mr Prescott's
teenage years.
But
the die-hards in his party will be pleased (and so, we
predict, will Mr Cameron's Tories).
|
For
good measure, he threw in a jibe about the new Tory leader that
any Labour veteran of 80 years ago would have been proud of. "I
see a bit of 'class' is coming back," he said, "with
Cameron and his outfit, the 'Eton Mafia'. We are always better
against class. It's the Eton mob, isn't it? ... I always feel
better fighting class anyway - brings the spirit back into the
Labour Party."
Tony
Blair must have muttered: 'Thanks a bunch, John.' He knows Old
Labour's obsession with class war contributed mightily to making
it unelectable for a generation. And anyway, the fact is that
the world, and Britain, have moved on since the days when trades
unionists in cloth caps were perceived as the salt of the earth..
Yet
here is Mr Prescott waving the old flag - and winning a round
of applause from the Labour Left in the House of Commons, who
believe that their day might yet come again. The irony, of course,
is that nobody is a more prominent beneficiary of class prejudice
than the Deputy Prime Minister. John Prescott does not owe his
own grand role in Government - the cars and flunkeys and red boxes
and front-of-the-place air travel - to brains or imagination.
He holds the office he does today simply as a symbol of what the
Labour Party used to be, a gesture towards the old apemen of the
trades union movement and what used to be called 'the working
class'.
Blair
has always known that Old Labour neither liked nor trusted him.
He has carried Prescott in his baggage since the party strife
of the early Nineties, to keep the comrades on side. A modern
Labour minister once described to me the experience of watching
Prescott in meetings - on transport, at the time of which we speak.
"It was like watching some huge wild creature trying to get
his mind round the erection of telegraph poles on his stretch
of savannah," said my acquaintance. Mr Prescott, of course,
had to be removed from his role as transport supremo after a series
of disasters even Tony Blair could no longer ignore.
Joke
Instead,
he was given command of local government and planning, with results
we see around us - our wonderful regional assemblies,together
with all those millions of new homes and wind turbines which will
soon render beautiful - in the eyes of the Deputy Prime Minister,
anyway - the British countryside.
Depending
on our viewpoint, Mr Prescott's high office is either a Blair
joke, much funnier than that of the Roman emperor who made his
horse a consul, or an insult to the British people. What is certain
is that his credentials for power rely solely on the fact that
a lot of old Labour types approve of him, because he was once
a ship's steward, and has learned nothing since.
Roy
Jenkins observed that there have been two other big Labour figures
since 1945 without any advantages of education - Ernie Bevin and
George Brown - but both possessed a high intelligence which passed
John Prescott by. Where some of us stop
laughing about Prescott's class obsession is at education. Blair
has made a mess of this vital issue, but at least today he acknowledges
a key point: if bright children are ever to
escape sink schools they must be separated from yobs and those
who care nothing for learning.
Pain
This
is what sticks in Prescott's gut. He hates anything that smacks
of 'elites' and 'privilege' - and, yes, 'middle-class values'.
All his instincts are to keep the clever and the ambitious right
down there with young lads and lasses who know that footie and
the pub are the big things in life.
All
of us want to live in a society in which opportunities are open
to all. What stinks about Prescott's vision is that he wants to
make sure that if one kid can't have some-thing, nobody else will
get it either. His gospel is the old, old Labour one of equality
of pain; levelling down, not up; holding back the whole nation
and its children to the speed of the slowest ship.
I
do not think John Prescott is a bad man. But if his attitude prevails,
it will do a lot of bad things to Britain, by wrecking its chances
of competing in the 21st century world. Class war is over. We
have left behind, thank goodness, a Britain in which someone receives
respect because of who their parents were or how they talk or
which school they attended. Boys who went to Eton tend now to
conceal the fact rather than boast about it, lest it damage their
career prospects.
All
that matters today is that effort and ability should have their
chances, and be rewarded. We want out children to have the best,
and to be the best. John Prescott is fool enough to fight this.
We might laugh at him, but we should also be deeply fearful of
the consequences, if he and his kind get their way in this Labour
government.
If you have
suggestions for additional subjects, or material to include in the
pages linked to the subjects listed, please contact the webmaster.
|
