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
3 , 2005 (765 days since war ended)
Death
Toll: 1,670 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
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.
|
1 9 7 0's
Hopeless
Heath and the REAL bad old days
Stephen
Glover - Daily Mail, Tuesday July 19, 2005
Reading
the many pieces about Edward Heath, one thing is missing. Obituarists
weigh his merits and his shortcomings, and on the whole come down
against him. What is absent is a sense of the sheer bloody awfulness
of Britain in the seventies. You have to be at least 40 to remember
this.
Being
young - I was 18 in 1970 - one was to some extent insulated against
what was going on. As a student, I could not be unemployed. Rising
inflation was a pretty distant worry. The Stock Market crash,
when it came, did not injure me very much. It was still possible
to have parties and to go out to pubs and restaurants. So I cannot
claim to have suffered personally as much as many full-grown adults.
Even
so, one was aware that life, after the reasonable affluent Sixties,
had suddenly taken an alarming turn for the worse. The first time
I saw Oxford, it was lit by candles because electricity supplies
had been cut during what was known as the 'three-day-week'. I
remember meeting an American in Italy and being commiserated with,
as though Britain were a pitiable basket-case.
I
also recall an article in the New York Times that grieved over
Britain's economic plight and argued that Americans, as our distant
cousins, should be supportive. The French regarded us with a mixture
of disbelief and Schadenfreude. One French book that sticks
in my mind from that time was called La Maladie Anglaise - the
English disease. We were the laughing stock of Europe, and everyone
knew it.
The
Left, and particularly the Far-Left, lapped it up. According to
them, the collapse of the British economy was the fulfilment of
Marx's long-awaited prophecy of the inevitable demise of capitalism.
In fact, the reason for Britain's plight was more prosaic. The
country was being held to ransom by rapacious trade unions, whose
belligerent activities were damaging one industry after another.
To
his credit, Mr Heath (as he then was) grasped this. But his attempts
at trade union reform, as encapsulated in the Industrial Relations
Bill, simply led to more strikes and protests. The Government
soon abandoned the Act, but the unions did not give up their industrial
action. In February 1974, menaced by the miners, Mr Heath went
to the country with the question 'Who governs Britain?' - and
got his answer. The trade unions did.
Growing
up in this period, it seemed incredible that our poor reduced
country had barely 30 years earlier stood alone in defence of
freedom against fascism and that well within out fathers' lifetimes,
Britain had been one of a handful of great powers, with an empire
on which the sun never set. The political language had become
that of decline - inevitable decline - and many people thought
that life about trying to eke out as good a time as was possible
before the waters closed in.
All
this will seem far-fetched to anyone born after 1970. No one now
mentions national decline. The Marxist idea that capitalism is
inherently doomed has long since been disowned by all save a few
lunatics. Trade unions - which determined whether we had electricity
in our living rooms or news-papers at our breakfast tables, and
whose wildcat activists were ruining the British car industry
- have been banished to the margins of our national life. Far
from being the sick man of Europe, Britain is one of the continent's
few economic success stories, and the Germans and French, who
only yesterday mocked our economic performance, are now the butt
of our jibes and scorn.
Has
a nation, other than those brought low by war, ever revived so
dramatically? It is difficult to think of one. But there was nothing
inevitable about this startling recovery. It happened because
one woman, backed at first by a few lonely and unfashionable supporters,
and condescended to by bien pensant people, had the courage and
determination to take on the trade unions and dismantle the inefficient,
monolithic state industries in which bad working practices flourished.
I
am talking about Margaret Thatcher.
Ted
Heath was in many ways unfortunate to lead Britain at such a time.
Could anyone have seen off the trade unions then? Could Mrs. Thatcher
(as she then was)? I doubt it. Mr Heath undoubtedly worsened the
poor hand that fate dealt him and fatally allowed his Chancellor
of the Exchequer, Tony Barber, to manufacture the mother of all
booms that led to the mother of all busts. But he was confronted
by overmighty trade unions before the nation had grown tired of
their ways, and the escalating oil price in 1973, following the
Arab-Israeli war, knocked a final nail into his coffin.
Margaret
Thatcher learnt from Ted Heath's mistake. She was stronger, but
more canny. Instead of taking on the trade unions with one unpopular
act, she advanced against them by degrees. Because the Tory-Labour
consensus had so demonstrably failed by the time she came to power
in 1979 - a consensus that she herself apparently embraced as
a minister in Mr Heath's 1970-74 administration - she had some
popular support in pursuing alternative economic policies.
And
yet do not forget the 365 so-called expert economists who dismissed
her policies or Tory 'wets', not excluding Mr Heath, who did the
same. If one cannot be sure that Mrs. Thatcher would have succeeded
had she found herself in Mr Heath's shoes between 1970 and 1974,
one can be certain that Mr Heath would not have triumphed if he
had been in her position after 1979. She grasped the opportunity
which many in her own party - let alone the Labour Party - forecast
would ruin her.
Even
New Labourites now privately admit that Margaret Thatcher laid
the foundations of Britain's present economic success. She made
mistakes - which leader does not? - but her triumph was to reject
the end-of-empire, cross-party consensus of inevitable decline,
to reinvigorate this country, and to give it back its self-belief.
Not
everything has improved over the past 30 years, of course. Crime
is worse. There is less civility. Many of our institutions, such
as Parliament or the Church of England or the Royal Family, have
weakened. Our nation is probably less united. It is even possible
to argue that some of our new problems can be attributed to the
economic success that Thatcherism has created. We may have become
a society of individuals too focused of material gain.
Yet
these are difficulties which almost anyone who lived through the
dismal Seventies will cheerfully accept by way of part exchange.
Britain under Ted Heath, and the Labour administration that followed
him, was heading downhill at a terrifying rate. The speed and
extent of our recovery have been astonishing. But there are no
assurances in the lives of nations. As we peer ahead, and wonder
whether new Labour is about to squander the inheritance that it
has so far largely protected, we should remember that it can all
be lost again.
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