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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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
The
Chancellor's single greatest act of vandalism in almost
nine years in office has been his wanton destruction of
Britain's private retirement industry. By slapping a massive
tax on pension funds, now worth
£7.3billion a year, he has helped to turn
the best private retirement industry in Europe into a basket-case
in perpetual crisis. Together with the adoption of European
accounting rules - which make it much riskier to operate
a company pension scheme - hundreds of firms have shut their
final salary plans to new employees and slashed benefits
to existing staff. From
Allister Heath: "I've seen the future and its grey"
in THE SPECTATOR - April 15, 2006
Nine
years ago the British people were sold a fantasy of clean
and competent government of principle and honesty. Its shiny
wrappings stripped away, the product now reveals its true
nature: Personal greed, arrogance, incompetence, shamelessness,
rash warmongering and an inability to accept - as is clear
to almost everyone else - that it is time to go. Editorial
- The Mail on Sunday, May 28, 2006
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October
28, 2006 (1279 days since war ended)
Death
Toll: 2811 US - 120 UK - >650,000? civilians - 25 media
November
5, 2006 (1270 days since war ended)
Death
Toll: 2837 US - 121 UK - >650,000? civilians - 25 media
I
hate to sound mean, but why does my son have to pay to go to a
British university when foreigners go free?
By
Tom Utley - Daily Mail, October 20, 2006
At
the rate we're going, it won't be long before Britain's student
population is drawn from three groups: foreigners; sons and daughters
of the rich; and young people from deprived backgrounds with poor
academic qualifications.
That
may be Tony Blair's idea of a recipe for excellence in British
education, education, education. But it's not mine.
Today,
foreigners are flooding in from the new EU member states at an
unprecedented rate. Five thousand, mostly from Cyprus and Poland,
have secured places at UK universities this autumn - a fivefold
increase since 2004, when the EU expanded,
This
is hardly surprising, since the expansion brought tuition fees
at British universities crashing down for citizens of the accesssion
states. Before 2004, they had to pay as much as £20,000
a year. Today, they are offered the same fees as British students.
I shall come to a shocking fact about that in a moment.
Before
I do, however, I must declare an interest. My two oldest sons
are at university - one in his third year at Edinburgh, the other
in his second at Newcastle. They are lucky, in that they secured
their places just in time to avoid the top-up tuition fees introduced
this term.
Shocking
So
they - or, rather I - pay 'only' £1,175 a year each for
their lectures and tutorials, while new arrivals have to pay £3000.
(Don't feel envious: I have two younger sons in the pipeline,
who will be stung for the whole whack when their time comes.
But
now for that shocking fact. It shocks me, anyway, as an Englishman,
with a son at Edinburgh. As most people know, one of the many
anomalies of devolution is that even the richest Scots are charged
no tuition fees at all at Scottish universities, while poor English,
Welsh and Northern Ireland students have to cough up.
But
how many realise that students from Poland, Cyprus and every other
EU country outside the UK also get free tuition in Scotland, at
the British taxpayer's expense, while those like my son have to
pay because they are English?
I
hate to sound mean and resentful, but I feel it's bad enough paying
through my taxes for the tuition fees of my son's richer Scottish
friends - though at least their parents make some contribution
to their offspring's fees though payments to Gordon Brown. But
how absolutely outrageously that English taxpayers should also
be required to subsidise the education of Greeks and Estonians,
who parents have never contributed a penny to the Exchequer, while
our own young are denied the same benefit.
Meanwhile,
all these EU students are also entitled to the same Low-interest
student loans as their British counterparts, not to be repaid
until they start earning serious money. The difference is that
a great many of them will slip off back to Athens or Talinn as
soon as they have graduated, never to be heard of again by the
Student Loans Company.
Ministers
have promised to employ international agents to track down graduates
who owe money. Oh yes? The government seems to find it difficult
enough to trace all the foreign ex-convicts and Al Quaeda suspects
at large in the Home Counties - never mind pursuing debt defaulter
across Eastern Europe.
It
is because of tuition fees, of course, that so many bright teenagers
from middle-income families, whose parents cannot afford to help
them out, are being deterred from applying to universities. As
many as 10,000 middle-class school-leavers who might have gone
on to higher education this term are said to have decided to get
jobs instead.
Students
from rich families, whose parents are constantly bunging them
cheques, have little to fear from fees of £3000 a year on
top of the costs of food and accomodation. Indeed, you'll hear
more braying and champagne corks popping in some student enclaves
of Edinburgh than in the Royal Box at Ascot.
Tragedy
The
very poor are often all right too, since so many grants and bursaries
are available to help them with their fees. But, as so often,
it is those who are stuck in the middle - with parents who can't
help and a government that won't - who are hardest hit. For many,
the prospect of leaving university in the red to the tune of £20,000
is truly terrifying. How will they ever get on the housing ladder
or start families on their own?
The
tragedy for Britain is that the aspirational middle classes have
always been out most fertile breeding ground of talent. But for
all the reasons I have given, these are the very people who are
being put off higher education, while Poles and plutocrats take
their places. Which brings me to that third category; what of
the growing proportion of students admitted to universities who
come from deprived backgrounds and attain poor qualifications
at school?
Let
me say at once that I don't at all resent subsidising bright,
working-class students who need state help. Nor do I mind that
university admissi0ns tutors take candidate's backgrounds into
account when they are offering places. They always have - since
long before this government started telling them to.
Talent
This
is for the thoroughly sensible reason that a teenager with an
A and two B's, who comes from a broken home and went to a lousy
school, is likely to be brighter and harder-working than many
an Etonian with the same grades. Admission tutors were always
in the business of talent spotting, rather than mere mark counting,
and always will be.
What
I do resent, however, is this week's advice from the irritatingly
named Aimhigher, the government-funded body set up to widen access
to higher education, that more than 40 Ucas points should be added
to the A-level scores of students from bad schools. That means
that a C grade earned by a deprived student would have to be treated,
in every case, as the equivalent of an A grade earned by a middle-class
student.
In
other words, admissions tutors are being urged to pretend that
pupils from third-rate schools did better than was actually the
case. Where before they were only asked to take a poor candidate's
background into account when they were scouting for talent, now
they are being told to assume automatically that a C-student from
a poor home has A-grade talent.
How
ridiculous. For one thing, any policy founded on a pretence -
the invasion of Iraq springs to mind - is bound to be a disaster.
For another, it is very unfair to bright, middle-class children
to say that at least 40 of their hard-earned Ucas points have
nothing to do with their own hard word and talent, but simply
come free with a good schooling.
As
I never tire of pointing out, the way to Improve Britain's education
system is not to penalise good schools, but to improve bad ones.
Where is the incentive to improve, when bad schools know their
pupils have scored 40 exam points before they have even scrawled
their names at the top of the paper.
There
is a way to reopen our universities to talented students of all
classes. Just follow the Utley three point plan:
(1) Bring back grammar schools, thereby restoring the ladder between
the working and middle classes.
(2)
Halve the number of university places, by abolishing fatuous courses
such as surf studies and leisure management.
(3)
The money save thereby should be spent on scrapping tuition fees
for UK tax payers - and giving primary school children a thorough
grounding in the three Rs.
There
you are. Problem solved.
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