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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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.
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December
1, 2005 (946 days since Iraq war ended)
Death Toll: 2,114 US - 98UK - >>6,164?
Iraqi - >>17,300? civilians - 25 media
Undermining
of marriage
Our
sex education policy is a disaster. So what does this New Labour
Government do? Extend it to 5-year-olds
writes
Melanie Philips in her column - Daily Mail, December 5, 2005
When
this Government falls into a hole, it knows exactly what to do.
It digs even faster and deeper, burying more and more victims
in the process. All evidence suggests that its sex education policy
is a disaster. Britain has the highest rate of underage teenage
pregnancies in Europe. The proportion of 13 to 15-year-olds getting
pregnant is rising. The rate of sexually transmitted diseases
among young people is going through the roof. Even the apparent
drop in under-18 pregnancy rates is no more than a statistical
sleight of hand, since the number of 16-year-olds using the morning-after
pill has doubled since it was made available over the counter
in January 2001.
Faced
with egregious failure of the strategy, government advisers now
propose a brilliant remedy. Apply it even more widely.
Their
solution - make sex lessons compulsory for all children from the
age of five, so that detailed knowledge about sex should become
a routine part of their education. No sooner will a child have
found his or her coat-peg and be measuring up the competition
for the climbing frame than some teacher will be rattling off
where babies come from.
IRRESPONSIBLE
So
while many children are not taught to read properly at five -
indeed, a disgraceful number can barely read and write when they
leave primary school at the age of 11 - they will be given 'more
rounded' lessons on sex and relationships. Is this not grotesquely
inappropriate?
The
assumption behind compulsory sex education is that not enough
such information is reaching children to promote responsible behaviour.
On the contrary, children can hardly move for this stuff, and
it is the message that it carries which is irresponsible.
During
the past decade, school sex education programmes promoting a 'safe
sex' message have hugely expanded. Government funded services
advise on how to have sex, where to get the morning-after pill
and how to spot sexually transmitted diseases. Girls as young
as 13 are even being offered sex advice by text message; they
tap in questions on their mobile phones and receive answers from
sexual health workers.
Yet
all this has not brought down the rate of sexual activity; far
from it. The more such value-free sex education and contraceptive
advice is given to children, the more their sexual activity increases.
The earlier in their lives this encouragement is provided, the
earlier their sexual activity takes place. This is because adult
values are being loaded onto children who are too emotionally
immature to cope with them. Teaching children that premature sex
is permitted, appropriate and fun encourages them to try it out.
That is hardly rocket science.
To
believe that teaching them to link sex to 'relationships' will
make them behave responsibly is simply risible. A 'relationship'
is a concept that is so slippery as to be meaningless. It belongs
to the world of TV soaps, which is about the level of reality
that defines so many teenage - and a dismaying number of adult
- sexual encounters to which the notion of permanent commitment
is entirely foreign.
The
increase in sexual promiscuity among children and teenagers is
not due to ignorance, but to the deliberate destruction of the
notion of respectability. Not only are official blind eyes turned
to enforcing the legal age of consent, but sex education actually
targets underage children.
Moral
guidelines is nowhere. Instead, sex education seeks to 'clarify'
the child's own values. But children need clear boundaries of
behaviour. Treating them as though they have adult values is to
abandon and even abuse them.
According
to these government advisers, sex education for 5-year-olds would
be confined mainly to 'relationships and friendships'. But who
can trust even this anodyne formulation, given the wildly inappropriate
sex 'education' materials used in some schools. One such video
shown to 9 and 10 year-olds enlightens them about different positions
for heterosexual, bisexual, lesbian and gay sex.
EXPLOITATIVE
Other
programmes require children to act out sexual behaviour. Such
material looks like propaganda for sexual licence, some of it
is so exploitative, it verges on the predatory. Is it surprising
that more and more children are acting out sexual behaviour, a
common response to sexual abuse? The worst of it is that such
materials are not shown to parents, who, on the rare occasions
when they do stumble across it, are invariably aghast and furious
at this abuse of both their children and of their own role.
But
then, the state is increasingly undermining parents and usurping
their responsibility to guide their own children in the most private
and personal areas of life. Schools dish out contraceptives and
pregnancy tests to 11-year-olds, and provide abortion services
to underage children without telling their parents. When Susan
Axon challenged this abortion practice in court, the Family Planning
Association said in evidence that the idea that 'parents know
what is best' for their children was out of date and the views
of health professionals should take precedence.
According
to the Government, parents increasingly cannot be trusted to impart
to their children qualities such as self-worth, restraint, friendliness,
empathy and resilience, so schools must now teach 'emotional literacy'.
Accordingly, 14 separate emotional areas are to be taught under
titles such as 'getting on and falling out', 'relationships' and
'good to be me'. This is nothing less than a State grab for control
over the way children think about the world - a creeping nationalisation
of childhood that is steadily destroying the independence of family
life.
What's
more, guidance on behaviour cannot be taught. It is learned by
example, by being brought up in a loving, stable environment,
where identity and moral values are forged. Children brought up
by their two parents are far less likely to have sex under 16
than those who are not.
FRAGMENTED
More
and more families are becoming unstable and fragmented. Yet instead
of shoring up the married family - the best antidote to irregular
behaviour - the Government is ruthlessly under-mining it by promoting
the idea that all lifestyles are equal. The Qualifications and
Curriculum Authority says primary schools need to cover a wider
range of relationships than the traditional nuclear family and
must teach children that families include same-sex couples, single
parents and children in local authority care.
Ministers
have progressively loaded the dice against marriage, making it
ever more meaningless. Now they are undermining it still further
with gay civil union, which comes into force today. Contrary to
the claims being made for this measure, it is not about equal
rights or greater self-discipline. It is part of a wider onslaught
on the whole notion of moral norms by separating sex, marriage
and procreation, destroying the unique place of marriage in society
as the institution that best safeguards the healthy regeneration
of human identity.
Both
adults and children are being funneled instead towards a sexual
free-for-all. This is surely why the government is so opposed
to sexual abstinence education. All the evidence is that abstinence
works in preventing irregular sexual activity. But the Government
does not want to prevent such activity. On the contrary, it wants
to promote it in order to produce 'equality' between lifestyles
- while tidying away any inconvenient consequences such as teenage
pregnancy.
Sex
education is therefore not a means of protecting this country's
fundamental values. It is a weapon in the war being waged against
them.
Undermining
of marriage
Top
judge accuses Labour of failing traditional families
By
Steve Doughty, Social Affairs Correspondent - Daily Mail, December
6, 2005
Labour
has done nothing but undermine the institution of marriage, the
most eminent family law judge said yesterday. The damning verdict
from Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss came as she demanded new state
support to encourage couples to marry. She condemned the 'sad
fact' that the Government has failed to help married couples and
accused ministers of downgrading the status of marriage.
She
said tax incentives to marry had been stripped away and lamented
that couples are now better off financially if they live together
without a wedding. The newly-retired judge criticised the ease
with which marriages break up. And she swept aside the fashionable
claim that divorce has little impact on the children of a couple,
saying: "The effect on children may be very serious indeed
and may have long-term consequences."
The
defence of marriage by Dame Elizabeth follows years in which the
remaining financial and social privileges attached to married
couples have been stripped away while rights are attached exclusively
to marriage have been extended to other groups. Dame Elizabeth,
62, has herself been an outspoken advocate of legal status for
gay couples.
But
in a speech to the Bar Council the judge, who retired inMarch
as President of the Family Division, said that married people
are 'a section of the public whose value to society has been seriously
undervalued'. She said: "Marriage is now often entered into
without any real effort or intention to make it last and it survives
only until one spouse chooses to bring it to an end. Marriage
does continue to have advantages which are not sufficiently trumpeted.
Support for marriage would have economic as well as social advantages
for the public and for the state."
She
added that there are around 150,000 divorces a year and said:
"I would suggest that divorce is not a private matter for
the couple and their children." Divorce affects community
and the state, Dame Elizabeth said. It had an adverse impact on
work, social life, relatives and friends.
"According
to research the effect on children may be very serious indeed
and may have long term consequences such as difficulties in forming
stable adult relationships. Family courts are clogged with disputes
post-divorce relating to children, housing, financial arrangements,
injuctions and non-molestation orders."
Dame
Elizabeth said the Government proclaimed iits support for the
family but it should be looking at ways to put that into practice.
"It is a sad fact that a Governement which has published
excellent proposals on helping parents and children after breakdown
of relationships has done nothing practical to support married
couples," she said. "In the past, married couples enjoyed
tax concessions which the Government has withdrawn. There is now
no financial incemntive to marry or remain married and a financial
incentive to cohabit and not to marry."
She
added: "The financial change of direction away from the support
of marriage has created a wasted opportunity to support a section
of the public whose value to society has been seriously undervalued."
Since
Labour came to power in 1997, marriage has been regarded as a
mere lifestyle option, while official policy has maintained that
all lifestyles and family structures are equally good. Labour
has abolished Married Couples Allowance, the last tax break for
married couples. It has introduced tax credits which favour single
mothers over couples, and has adopted a policy of removing the
very word marriage from official forms and documents.
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