Culture war weapons #1

“the creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to say which was which.” - George Orwell, Animal Farm.

I’ve got two problems with our particular neighbourhood of the blogosphere.

The first is that while I share much of my colleagues’ anger and frustration at the utter failure of our rulers to get a grip and deal with the threats and other problems that face us today, analysis of how it all came to go so badly wrong so quickly tends to be sketchy or absent.

[Please, honourable exceptions; do not hurt me; you know who you are but I might have missed you out. I’d love to read your thoughts on this.]

Because who controls the past controls the future and who controls the present controls the past, I sought to find out how our peaceful, law abiding and respected country has so quickly degenerated into corruption, crime and poverty and I needed to find out right soon.

The other part of my worries about my comrades of the dextrosphere is that some are too optimistic about our side’s chances of making effective change on the one hand and also their current almost eschatological hope for nationwide political upheaval and some exciting overthrowing to be done against our corrupt and self-serving new masters. I think that this latter posture is reactionary in both senses of the word.

I’m a conservative and therefore I don’t expect any single source to have all or even most of the answers, but…

Knowledge is power and power is a weapon, as well as a goal, of war.

The Triumph of the Political Class by Peter Oborne is a very fine weapon indeed, as it is a rich source of truth about the present and recent past of British politics.

A political journalist and author, Oborne has anatomized our new ruling caste: their origins and beliefs; their activities, inter-relations and ways of life, and what this all means for good government. It means death.

Bullet-points now for the skim-reader, about the political class, hereinafter referred to as the PC;

# What we’ve got here is a self-perpetuating elite of lifelong, full-time politicians who are usually university educated and have no business or military experience and who subsist pretty much as financial beneficiaries of the State and the State’s clients and supporters (such as the mainstream media, the subsidized arts and academia, and certain favoured State-supplying private contractors and think-tanks.) They have no interests inside civil society and none within politics other than the accumulation and use of power for self and partisan – or factional – gain.

# The PC has corrupted almost all the institutions of government and society that once were anatomized as ‘The Establishment’: the formerly neutral Civil Service, the security services, the judiciary and rule of law, parliament and the independent press, and has even muscled into the Royal Family’s private grief for partisan advantage.

# It has blurred the distinctions between the private spheres of family, charity and commerce and merged them into public power and the institutions of government and on top of this it has broken down the separation of party political interests and the State and the State’s resources.

#Why?

Political party membership has tumbled since 1945 for 20% of the population to a few hundred

thousand now. Political parties need media resources to persuade would-be voters as the mass doorstep canvass has become a thing of the past. This requires money and control over the media.

#What?

The PC believes in the overwhelmingly beneficial power of government to improve the lives of individuals and nations – if government given enough power and freedom to use it at will.

#Who?

The 1960’s university Marxists plus the Age of Aquarius radical individualists have moved into politics to effect their ends peacefully but dishonesty via the conquest and subordination of traditional national institutions to their ends alone.

Some impatience with the old establishment began under the Thatcher Tories’ time in office – remember her liking for Yes Minister?, and so some boundaries began to be eroded or overleapt in her eagerness to get the country working and prosperous again, and to win the Cold War. However, this was as nothing compared with the monsoon of subversion and the embedding of partisan ‘advisers’ throughout Whitehall when New Labour came to power.

They have no income of their own apart from what they can make in government and from its clients so they can’t really do the honourable thing when they are proved to be wrong or dishonest and resign – so the Civil Service gets to carry the can instead.

#How?

>Corruption of the Civil Service’s upper echelons from being professional and permanent governmental advisors to becoming partisans of the ruling party’s policies. Subordination of Cabinet Secretaries’ impartiality to New Labour’s factional needs, for example, began much from the start of Tony Blair’s first term of office.

>Creating a political and media elite who feed each other – exciting initiatives announced in newspapers whose circulations rise in return for support up to and including the whitewashing of corruption and the smearing of honest officials and whistleblowers. The press was right at the head of the queue to trash the reputation of the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner Elizabeth Filkin as she battled and tried to punish MPs’ corruption. She was ousted in part by the press and in part by briefings made by senior figures in all three major political parties.

>Bringing partisan outsiders (‘advisors’) into government – and empowering them to issue orders to the Civil Service.

>Muscling in on the judiciary.

>Absolving a tame and well-paid Parliament from the consequences of improper conduct and persecuting the upholders of its honour and propriety.

>Using military and political intelligence data for purposes of public persuasion.

>Well-paid movement available and unchecked between politics, Civil Service, private companies that water at the public trough, plus quangos and think-tank/’charities’ that support the statist party line. Bankers’ bonuses, anyone? Polly Toynbee at Guardian and BBC.

> Absorbing the leadership of all three national parties into a comfortable club wherein mutual support and shared values set them against their own core supporters and the national interest. Creating and fighting over a soggy centre ground where, for example, the class interests of the working classes or the middle classes are frustrated by the sheer lack of competition between party leaders and their policies.

Results.

# Democracy becomes a meaningless sham; a game of musical chairs played by a small group of friends where everyone gets a go at the prizes in return for not offering the voters distinct choices that would exclude the other players for a parliament or three. Call them the NewLabDemoServatives.

# Government is incompetent: unquestioned by an investigative media which has now become government’s poodle, and unchecked in folly and haste by a neutered Civil Service and a weakened judiciary, it spends money like water on projects that achieve little or no good, often do great harm, and managed to make a just war against undoubted tyrants and the foulest ideological and existential assailants on Earth both unpopular and Britain’s part in it unappreciated by the bulk of a (briefly-indoctrinated) British public.

# People are looking for something else; something that the deracinated, internationalist corrupted, invaded and subverted gentlemen’s club of Westminster Whitehall and their arts, media and academic cheerleaders and apologists and their refuses to address.

In a recession which is morphing into a depression, what people turn to might not be very nice at all…

And the PC is clueless when its policies lead directly to something other than the heirs of Churchill and Atlee.

There is no single source of truth this side of the Afterlife, and so I take some exception to what Oborn has written:

> He understates the importance of cultural Marxism – which would be influential in government and the academy, media and arts even if we brought back Maggie and Norman Tebbit (Peace Be Unto Them) and the old-style Civil Service; Sir Humphrey Appleby and all today.

(Men kissing in Doctor Who, Skins, Life on Mars, atheists on Thought For The Day!)

> He understates the importance of the European Union and how the left-wing ’Conservatives’ had sold off much of Parliament’s power and our freedom long before Tony Blair and Gordon Brown set foot in Downing Street.

> He thinks the West was wrong to go to war with Iraq. I disagree, but that’s for another time.

However, if you really want to know what’s been going on and why you absolutely must shout at the ‘Conservative’ on Question Time as he goes along with the four other Left-wing celebrities’ high-spending fantasies and their anti-Semitism, and wonder why no TV interviewer ever asks any politician ’What makes you think the Government has the right to tax people to pay for this untested programme?’ – then The Triumph of the Political Class will show the source much of your anger.

Which takes me back to my issues with other Starboard watchers…

Part One.It’ll be easy: once we win the election and we get on of ours into power.

No, it won’t. The three main parties are riddled with the PC and they are going to fight like hell to keep their privileges and they’ll have the full force of the PC in the media, the academy and entertainment accusing us of genocide if our Health Secretary suggests the thriftier use of generic sticky tape in NHS stationery offices. Detoxifying the Civil Service will be a long and bloody struggle with Tony’s Cronies and Gordon’s Morons fighting every foot of the way and all four broadsheets and the BBC and Sky slandering our work as ‘politicization of the Civil Service’ – a decade after it was in fact completed and ignored by the MSM.

Even if (heaven forefend!) a tidal wave wiped out half a Tory Cabinet and left John Redwood, David Davis and Liam Fox in charge, they’ll have to be damned careful and offer the remaining, purged Civil Service its old position of influence and privilege back again.

I’d give Elizabeth Filkin the job, with the promise of Cabinet Secretary as a retirement present once the job was done.

And by the time all this was done, then the cultural Marxists would have marched through the last surviving parts of the Education, Justice, Defence and Transport Ministries and would be holding the government of the day to some kind of ransom.

Still, that’d be something for a loyal and independent Civil Service to actually deal with to prove their regained integrity...

Part Two; we really need a change of the whole set-up.

No we bloody don’t. The careful oversight of the separation of powers between Parliament, bureaucracy, judiciary, party and private enterprise created by a century and a half of careful integrity-testing by the uptight squares and judgemental Victorian mandarins worked. Let’s not fanny around with constitutional conventions and upheavals – let’s just haul the ship of State off the reef, hang the mutineers, and let the true authorities do their fewer, and cheaper, legitimate tasks.

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Today's the day: Modern Liberty

Modern Liberty is happening today nationwide.

I don't know what's going to come of it but it is a major event aimed at protecting and promoting freedom in the UKGB.

Some famous names from Right and Left alike are about to duke it out in cities all over the country and on-line - about which more here.

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Update at 17.51.

It's not looking good, ladies, gentlemen and unbelievers.
Over at Citizens and Neighbours Cassandra comments thus: I've watched some of it, but it's another Leftist hoax. I.e. people advocating liberty while pursuing policies (all idealistically motivated of course) that lead directly to the opposite. Misguided pinheads to a man!

And Old Rightie has the opposite problem:
Not a sausage in the news, bastards. Bar Straw saying how free all his Muslim voters are. I hope this is a successful day for all concerned.

Oops...

Worcester sauce

Moderate Islam in partnership with Tories.
Click on the pics to see the be-autiful truth.

In 2007 Worcester Conservatives did this...



...and after the Gazan war they are preparing to do this...


It's so working out well.

I mean, co-operation like this is in no way radicalising Moslem youths in Worcester, is it? What's the point , when you can get the Conservatives to support Hamas themselves?

Still, I've got to admire the second photo's caption writer.
Quite a sense of humour, if you look closely.. :-)


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This is not just a blog

A word about advertising.

Though I have not been actively blogging this week (due to a contagion so foul that it has no medical name nor – conveniently - any scientifically proved cure that is indistinguishable from bed-rest, watching endless cheap sci-fi DVDs and consuming otherwise fattening but medically-absolved snack-food products, and which has elicited the sympathy both from Mrs. Northwester herself and also from kindly readers thankyouthankkyouthankyou from the length and breadth of the western edge of our common European home and one of its islands), my feeble attempt to get rich quick without doing any work by adding Google Ad Sense has burst upon my site in all its tacky glory.

Set up a fortnight ago by a professional coder who swims the oceans of perl like a, well…like a noble salmon breasting the salty wave but who is considerably cheaper-sounding, (and who says I’ll never make much money using Ad Sense, but I can’t afford his professional services to optimize the blog anyway, so asking him to help me was like getting Paderewski to play the joanna for pass-the-parcel or inviting Hannibal Lecter to tell the kids bedtime stories) this service will stick ads in my site which you will all ignore, thus keeping West Hollywood and Martha’s Vineyard safe from my new-money vulgarity for decades longer than would otherwise be the case.

Still, a British conservative who blogs in favour of a smaller and more effective State, alongside more social conservatism in public matters - including 90-day detention for some jihadist terror suspects (and thus possibly alienating my hastier and less-generously built libertarian readership) - and who tries to do this despite the notorious fact that the David Cameron is leading the official Conservative Party to the political centre where all is mush and state-worship and moral relativism and mawkish sentimentality: and all early in a 2009 when President Obama is signing off a three trillion dollar pork barrel national economic euthanasia measure on behalf of Democratic Party campaign donors and who is also intending to leave Iraq alone this year to fill its own barrels with what is likely to be Iranian-owned oil soon enough does tend to indicate a certain optimism on my part, or as one might also say an insane lack of realism.

On the other hand: I haven’t posted anything new for two days; the service only came online this morning and I’ve already earned $1.10, so what do you say to that, Mister Rugfish? What do you really know, Spocko? Huh?

One promise that I can give to my small (but select and punctuation-tolerant readership) is this: the presence of advertising on these pages will in no way effect the content, form, subject or purpose of my political and moral writing.

Probably.

My writing is my heart; my soul; my testament to our great and beleaguered civilization. It is the real thing. I shall continue to fight against the growing global Islamist menace with freshness and confidence. My words will continue to echo - I hope - in some small way the words of our great national hero and Conservative leader Churchill who insured our safety so well and who put such a premium on freedom at a time when Christian culture and decency were massively discounted. I shall choose my subjects prudentially, dropping my pearls of wisdom upon my readers to maintain the standard of our mutual life in a co-operative spirit. Above all else, I shall remain calm, dignified and collected and not make a drama out of a crisis.
At a time of national economic and military peril, I shall not lard my writings with allusions to groceries not pepper it with key words which might attract foodstuffs advertising.

I shall continue to eschew actual swearing in the main body of my text as a good social conservative should, and if any swear-blogger should say I’m wimping out then let me put them on notice that I wouldn’t give a XXXX to do anything else.

From Far Left to frothing-at-the-mouth Ultra b Right, I intend to go on (irrespective of petty commercial considerations) giving the good old Victory V sign to all the jokers who are messing up our beloved country, our ancestral continent, and our Mother Earth.

It’s what your right arm’s for.


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Man 'Flu

Got Man 'Flu. Going to let the nicest Lefty-liberal in the Universe pamper me. I may be away from the computer and using other household furniture and facilities instead for a couple of days.

In the meantime if you haven't already seen them, I draw your attention to the following alphabetically arranged stars of the Starboard Watch's blogging firmament...

http://brackenworld.blogspot.com/

http://flyingwarpigs.blogspot.com/

http://muffledvociferation.blogspot.com/

http://newportcity.blogspot.com/

http://www.reversevampyr.blogspot.com/

http://www.theospark.net/

PS, I expect you'll all keep on shoving it up the jokers good and hard whilst I am fed sugared dates and chicken soup by a goth belly-dancer.

Even in adversity I can find beauty and therefore the strength to go on.

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BBC publishes something nice about Mrs Thatcher

Here.

Weird, isn't it? like some kind of alternative reality...

'She does not look like a career woman'

DUSTED OFF The Magazine delves into the archives

Thirty years after Margaret Thatcher entered Number 10, the BBC Archive has released documents and broadcasts offering glimpses into its early dealings with the future leader, and through them an insight into her path towards Downing Street.

Her main charm to me was that she does not look like a 'career woman' The BBC's Joanne Symons notes her impression of Mrs Thatcher in 1957 BBC Thatcher archive

The collection includes memos and production notes not intended for publication relating to Lady Thatcher's early appearances on radio and television.

The earliest known reference to Margaret Thatcher in the archive is from 1957, pre-dating her election as a member of parliament in 1959, and is a typed memo (see below) written by Joanne Symons, detailing a meeting between herself and Mrs Thatcher.

Sent to Joyce Pullen in the women's programme department it recommends the then barrister as someone suitable for broadcast.

"Mrs Thatcher is 30 ish I suspect tho' she could pass for much younger, very pretty and dresses most attractively. Very 'feminine'!" Symons reports.

She compliments the future prime minister's clear thinking and offers a conclusion that would be unthinkable to many now: "Her main charm to me was that she does not look like a 'career woman'!"

Symons' comments were evidently listened to, as some weeks after the memo, Mrs Thatcher appeared on Your Own Time, which the Radio Times billed as a "light-hearted programme for younger women".

She spoke in her capacity as a barrister in a discussion entitled It's a Woman's World.

Unfortunately this programme was not kept by the BBC, but visitors to the archive can explore clips of other key television and radio appearances which have survived.

The earliest is an edition of Any Questions? broadcast in 1960 in which Mrs Thatcher made a witty appearance as a panellist in her first year as an MP.

The broadcast took place long before the voice coaches went to work to lower the tone of her speaking voice.

Iron lady

"Excellent feminine voice. First class broadcasting manner," remarked a producer in production notes two years later in 1962 following another appearance by Mrs Thatcher.

Over the series of video, audio clips and documents, readers can follow her transformation into the "Iron Lady" who would eventually enter number 10.

Yet speaking in 1972, on the radio programme Women in Politics, she felt that was one door a female politician was many years away from breaking down. She said the prospect of a woman becoming prime minister was something she would never see in her lifetime.



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Pure sincerity

"Horse nomads should treat settled farmers and city dwellers with respect," says Mr.G Khan.

" Street girls and Jews are innocent and should be respected and cared for," says Whitechapel philanthropist JtR.

" Servants and other vulnerable young women should be respected and free to choose their own lifestyle," from our court corresponded, M de Sade.

"We will put people first, not bankers" The prime minister explains how new institutions with new values will govern our banking system.

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Wombles versus Clangers

This from the ever-thoughtful George Monbiot, whose colossal intelligence is so formidable as to have entered the English language as the axiom 'as bright as a Monbiot;.

This is indeed a class war, and the campaign against the Aga starts here.

Climate change allows the richest on earth to trash the lives of the poorest, no matter how Furedi's cult spins it

The Guardian, Tuesday 13 January 2009.

It would be stupid to claim that environmentalism is never informed by class.

It would also be stupid to claim that the fight against the giant lizards is never informed by class, and for identical reasons.

Compare, for example, the campaign against patio heaters with the campaign against Agas. Patio heaters are a powerful symbol: heating the atmosphere is not a side-effect, it's their purpose. But to match the fuel consumption of an Aga, a large domestic patio heater would have to run continuously at maximum output for three months a year. Patio heaters burn liquefied petroleum gas, while most Agas use oil, electricity or coal, which produce more CO2. A large Aga running on coal turns out nine tonnes of carbon dioxide per year: 35% more than the total CO2 production of the average UK home. To match that, the patio heater would have to burn for nine months.

[•This article was amended on Wednesday 14 January 2009. We said that a large Aga running on coal turns out nine tonnes of carbon dioxide per year: five times the total CO2 production of the average UK home. We meant to say that an Aga produces 35% more than the total CO2 production of the average UK home. This has been corrected.]

My concerns about your command of facts was all for nothing, and I am relieved.

So where is the campaign against Agas? There isn't one. I've lost count of the number of aspirational middle-class greens I know who own one of these monsters and believe that they are somehow compatible (perhaps because they look good in a country kitchen) with a green lifestyle. The campaign against Agas - which starts here - will divide rich greens down the middle.

‘Rich greens’.

What poetry; one thinks of exotic, feather-leaved ferny Far Eastern brassicas sprouting in the allotment. Also, the very existence of ‘Rich greens ‘is a sign of what we, dear reader, are up against.

To recap: industrial capitalism creates massive surpluses whereby large classes of administrators and intellectuals can be supported in their unproductive activities; worrying about the weather and trying to save us from ourselves. Without industrial civilisation, rich greens would

A) have died as children, (or, if female, died in childbirth eventually, or straight away, giving rise to the constant storybook theme of the wicked stepmother, of whom rich green have never heard), or B) be doing something un-rich by modern standards, but richly green, like spreading manure in the fields on frosty January mornings in the hope that they and their surviving illiterate children might not starve much next winter.

But it is even more stupid to dismiss all environmentalism as a middle-class whim.

We on the Right, Georgie-boy, do not dismiss it as ‘middle-class whim’ at all. It’s what we social conservative types invent pairless euphemisms like trouser fudge and skull-bongo for.

It's the poor who live beside polluting factories, whose lives are wrecked by opencast mining, who can't afford to move away from motorways or flood zones.

In which the otherwise destitute work or mine, and along which their food is driven to the shops, their children are bussed to school, and along which their wailing wives are ambulanced to antiseptic maternity suites where the machine that goes ping! is ready to save them and their infants from the otherwise inescapable horrors of breach births, ragged-knifed sections, and in which many gallons of refrigerated blood are ready to refill their haemorrhaging arteries. And muscle and wind power alone seems to have saved the Netherlands from being the Atlantic Ocean, though machine-based technology seems to be improving that. Perhaps the political/economic bases of countries like Bagladesh might have something to do with being unable to deal with flooding?

They are hit first and worst by climate change. Those who claim that all environmentalists are middle or upper class ignore the tens of millions of peasants and labourers who have mobilised on green issues in south Asia, Africa and Latin America . They indulge a transparent sophistry: some greens are aristocrats; all green issues are therefore the preserve of toffs.

Monbiot, whose Apple Mac is woven from willow withies and runs on the bio-heat generated by composting muesli, continues…

Nowhere is this class-branding more evidently wrong than in the debate over flying. This week the government is expected to announce that a third runway will be built at Heathrow. MPs, airline bosses and rightwing newspapers have been trying to soften us up by insisting that this is happening for the benefit of the poor. Those trying to stop new runways are toffs preventing working-class people from having fun.

Monbiot has travelled throughout Canada and the United States, campaigning on climate change and promoting his book.

He arrived there after an arduous transatlantic voyage in a cold-air balloon pulled by the goose-daemons of the Northern Witches.

The group that has worked hardest to portray the issue this way is the weird cult that arose from the Revolutionary Communist party. This Trotskyist splinter, whose chief theorist is the sociology professor Frank Furedi, has spent the last 30 years moving ever further to the right. The magazine it founded in 1988, Living Marxism (later called LM), celebrated power and demanded total market freedom. It campaigned against bans on tobacco advertising, child pornography and the ownership of handguns.

Commies for freedom and sick mentalities to boot. Who’d a thunk it possible that Marxists and people who read with approval about child-molesters could have anything in common.

It denied that genocide had taken place in Rwanda , or ethnic cleansing in Bosnia . It provided a platform for writers from the hard-right Institute for Economic Affairs…

‘Hard-right’ here meaning ‘people who wear suits’ and ‘people who prepare detailed research papers about how economics actually works by studying the people who invent, produce, sell and transport things like George’s underpants and the disposable swabs and other unrecyclable dressings that must have been used when a security guard put a fence-post through his foot, allegedly. It’s Institute ‘for’ Economic Affairs; but what’s a mere conjunction to someone who confuses 35% of something with five times something?

…and Center..

Sic - it’s American ‘Center’ Nice bit of British cultural snobbery in your hand-loom-woven spell-checker there, George. Do keep it up, there’s a good chap…

…for the Defence of Free Enterprise.

…which doesn’t seem to think that the State is a terribly good thing for providing prosperity and happiness in human affairs.

Probably some irrational prejudice they picked up in the Twentieth Century somewhere, I suppose, between class-conscious multi-million Marxist mass murder and tree-hugging, Rhine-worshipping secular-humanist Germans at that old genocide thing.

Frank Furedi started writing for the Centre for Policy Studies, which was founded by Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher. He and the LM writer Tony Gilland wrote to the supermarket chains, offering - for £7,500 - to educate "consumers about complex scientific issues".

LM closed in 2000, and was replaced by the web magazine Spiked. Edited by Brendan O'Neill, it concentrates on denying the existence of social and environmental problems, and attacking protest movements with a hatred so intense and disproportionate that it must contain an element of self-disgust.

O'Neill, who still describes himself as a Marxist and blogs for the Guardian, calls environmentalism a "death cult" run by "fear-mongering, snobbish, isolationist puritans". The "anti-flying squad" is "illiberal, irrational, parochial, narrow-minded and backward". Plane Stupid's recent protest at Stansted, he says, was motivated by "unabashed, undiluted, unattractive class hatred".

Got it, I think. This particular bunch of commies, beaten down by the wealth, freedom, prosperity pride and optimism generated by the free-trading Thatcher years of forthright and unapologetic conservatism, realized that despite their nineteenth-century founder’s assertions free trade, property and mass production could - in a polity of law and democracy - provide the poorest in society with hitherto unknown levels of comfort, security and luxury. And Georgie-boy, he doesn’t like it.

If you understand and accept what climate science is saying, you need no further explanation for protests against airport expansion.

Big if that, what with all the skepticism around from, well, climate scientists.

But if, like Brendan and his fellow travellers, you refuse to accept that man-made climate change is real, you must show that the campaign to curb it is the result of an irrational impulse. The impulse they choose, because it's an easy stereotype and it suits their prolier-than-thou posturing, is the urge to preserve the wonders of the world for the upper classes. "Cheap flights," O'Neill claims, "has become code for lowlife scum, an issue through which you can attack the 'underclass', the working class and the nouveau riche with impunity."

I for one would never call environmentalism a "death cult" run by "fear-mongering, snobbish, isolationist puritans".

Good Lord, no.

There are rules against plagiarism, and I for one respect them. I’ll stick with my very own ‘echo-headed killjoy gut-crumpets’ for now.

The connection seems obvious, doesn't it? More cheap flights must be of greatest benefit to the poor. A campaign against airport expansion must therefore be an attack on working-class aspirations. It might be obvious, but it's wrong.

Well, maybe these commies, being inherently conspiracy theorists like their founder, tend to believe that people have motives other than the obvious, open ones that the rest of us use to figure out our fellow man’s actions.

The Sustainable Development Commission collated the figures on passengers using airports in the United Kingdom between 1987 and 2004. During this period, total passenger numbers more than doubled and the price of flights collapsed. The number of people in the lowest two socio-economic categories (D and E) who flew rose,…

Which might be due to the lower prices, perhaps, one of those supply-and-demand things we like to call market forces but you like to call ‘development’ or ‘globalization.’

…but their proportion fell, from 10% of passengers in 1987 to 8% in 2004. By 2004, there were over five times as many passengers in classes A and B than in classes D and E.

Today, the Civil Aviation Authority's surveys show, the average gross household income of leisure passengers using Heathrow is £59,000 (the national average is £34,660); the average individual income of the airport's business passengers (36% of its traffic) is £83,000. The wealthiest 18% of the population buy 54% of all tickets, the poorest 18% buy 5%.

Luton, Gatwick, Manchester , Prestwick ? More proley the further you get away from Westminster and Whitehall, do you think? Where do all those chavtastic flights head out to the Costa Del Sol fly from and are you seriously saying they’re outnumbered by olive-stuffers on their way to Chiantishire? Perhaps we should ask the Polly Toynbee at 2 minutes along this recording..?

Just asking.

Glad the riff-raff are being kept out of the waiting-lounge again, George. Not that you’d notice; being towed everywhere in your adventures by the indefatigable Lee Scoresby and the great armoured polar bears -… Polar Bears!? Say, is that why you and Big G Al are so fussed about the polar bears; you need them to protect you and your little furry souls from the Gobblers?

O'Neill champions Ryanair , Britain 's biggest low-cost carrier, as the hero of the working classes. So where would you expect this airline to place most of its advertising? I have the estimated figures for its spending on newspaper ads in 2007. They show that it placed nothing in the Sun, the News of the World, the Mirror, the Star or the Express, but 52% of its press spending went to the Daily Telegraph. Ryanair knows who its main customers are: second-home owners and people who take foreign holidays several times a year.

Who, in the age of the one-penny ticket, is being prevented from flying? It's not because they can't afford the flights that the poor fly less than the rich; it's because they can't afford the second homes in Tuscany , the skiing holidays at Klosters or the scuba diving in the Bahamas . British people already fly twice as much as citizens of the United States, and one fifth of the world's flights use the UK 's airports. If people here don't travel, it's not because of a shortage of runways.

At the core of the campaign against a third Heathrow runway are the blue-collar workers and working-class mums of the village of Sipson, whose homes are due to be flattened so that the rich can fly more. If wealthy people don't like living under a flight path, they can move; the poor just have to lump it. Through climate breakdown, the richest people on earth trash the lives of the poorest.

Well, our ‘poor’ are richer than the Third-World poor – those poor who move themselves across oceans and continents to get to all the places with the made-up roads and airports and build-up areas where there’s lots of food and buildings and education for their families. They don’t do all that in order to live in yurts. They do so in order to become blue-collar workers and working-class mums. Maybe they’re not just the poorest but also the stupidest people on Earth – migrating to where all those nasty, polluting machines are?

Yes, this is a class war; and Brendan O'Neill and his fellow travellers have sided with the toffs. These Marxist proletarian firebrands are defending the class they profess to hate. Bosses of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your planes.

Aside from the eminently fiskable ‘science’, this lad needs to look at the real world in which people live and migrate to the West. He advocates less technology and l less wealth – for the others: not for himself.

He needs to take a clearer, better look at the real world. The northern shamans of old flew out over the Earth in the form of wild geese, and as they were often male, so perhaps what he needs to do is take a proper gander, rather than indulging in its homophone?

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Bo Derek and Sarah Michelle Gellar

...are Republicans!


I may now have to use the internet for it most frequently-used purpose....














Finding information.
See here for slide show of night Right-wing celebrities.

And here's a list from a Fleetwood Mac site of Republican celebrities of stage, screen and recording studios.

And wiki.
Hooray for Hollywood
But..Denzel Washington? Really?

I thought he made his living playing angst-ridden anti-everything good hand-wringers? You know, the Henry Fonda or Jack Hawkins type of person; kind of like me playing Harold Pinter or Polly Toynbee...


There may be hope yet.

Home.

The noticeboard

Just in case you haven't noticed, my noticeboard of freedom and country-based campaigns and campaigners is now up and...er...walking.

It's a lot politer than this, my ranting site, but then it's intended to allow people of good faith to publicise and connect with those individuals and groups who are actually doing something about the miserable way we are mis-governed.

it is however intended to be a repository of contact details for those involved in our national and civilisational fight for survival, and a suppository of tools to use on our ruling class.

For those who haven't looked at this rudimentary service yet, I've copied and pasted its two introductory 'pages' below.

About Citizens and Neighbours

Welcome to Britain's online freedom resources blog.
Our shared antagonist is an over-mighty and impertinent government along with its supporters and cheerleaders in the media and academia.

What is Citizens and Neighbours?
CAN is a place where people who struggle against excessive and untraditional authority can find information:

# information about others who are concerned about how our country and our world are being changed
# information about who is in charge of foolish or malicious attacks on our freedom and against our other traditional rights, and information about how to find them and tell them they are doing wrong
# information about who also is resisting the destruction that wrong-headed politicians and officials are doing
# information about resources that they can use to protect their own, and our own, free way of life
# information about the course of campaigning– its successes and failures and warnings of governmental foolishness to come

CAN is also intended to be a place where people of varied backgrounds and interests can find out that far from being alone they are in fact part of a large majority of folk who do not like what is being done to Britain and its institutions.
I hope that this blog’s visitors will contact people in other specialized campaigns and see if they can find common cause; pool time, resources, and manpower.

This blog publicizes campaigns, ideas, freedom-loving and traditional organisations and people, but it does not necessarily endorse the activities, opinions or candidates of any of the organisations that it lists.

The tone of the blog is intended to be upbeat, cheerful and in the spirit of 'can do'!

Please comment and offer ideas and suggestions, or point out errors and send links to groups and campaigns you believe are aimed in preserving the best of Britain.
Can do.

What is Citizens and Neighbours definitely not?

CAN is not the mouthpiece of any particular political party or pressure group.

I'm not a member, fee-paying or otherwise, of any association or group more power-seeking than my local sports centre and the city library.
Much of the trouble with our country today is that the main political parties seem to hold similar views and policies on the great questions of the day; that is, they all pretty much seem to think that the government knows best.

Well, mostly, it doesn’t.

Government can perform a few basic tasks simply and well (usually of the sort of task that involves protecting people as they go about their own private business). Once it tries to improve peoples’ lives in detail it becomes muddled, expensive, frustrated, confused and then - very quickly - overbearing and authoritarian. The Big Three parties, with honourable exceptions, go along with the line that freedom and our country’s other traditional virtues and treasures are of little value compared with administrative efficiency and their ideas of what sort of good lives we ought to be pursuing.

There are several smaller parties which actively seek to put freedom and other traditional blessings of living in Britain at a premium. Where appropriate* I publicize and link to them.

So, independent of all groups and affiliations, CAN recognizes that our country and its traditional values have been built by generations of men and women of all political persuasions and of none; men and women working and sometimes fighting and lobbying and trading ideas to make our homeland better.
Britain’s virtues are the product of all that and it often involved great sacrifice – sometimes the greatest sacrifice. So we should honour them and the spirit of what they achieved by recognizing that Britain is home to all of us and any and all of us may have an equal interest in keeping the best of it.

I’ll try to publicize all recognizably freedom-loving and patriotic campaigns and groups – even if I don’t personally agree with something about them.
This is because:

A) they might be right and I might be wrong, and

B) people of goodwill can legitimately love this country and its freedoms and traditions and still have differing viewpoints of how best to serve it and within the limits of being law-obeying and peaceable, I’ll link to them.

For example, freedom and public safety are both valuable things, and they are often in conflict with one another as far as legislation is concerned. A great many freedom-loving people opposed both the 90 day or 42 day detention periods for anti-terrorism legislation. A small minority – or so it seemed to me – supported 90 days, including me.
‘Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,’ – what to do when life is at odds with liberty, or pursuing happiness threatens life? Both viewpoints were seeking to maintain some virtue or other in public life in Britain. So both would get a chance on this blog.

I’m a keen trade unionist myself – the Tolpuddle Martyrs and all that – for all the faults which our unions still display even today. CAN is not about trade or employment disputes and campaigns; they are usually well-supported elsewhere. Good luck to them when their cause is just, but that’s not what this blog is about.

CAN is also not about exposing and criticizing the wickedness of commercial businesses. The web’s scattered with such sites and campaigns. But when companies are acting on the instructions of excessive government or using illegitimate powers that government has given to them, this blog will point it out and welcomes information of that type.

It’s all about Britain’s traditional political and civic culture and its values; the foremost being freedom but there are others: tolerance; widespread property ownership; privacy; civic pride.

So CAN points its arrows right at excessive government and its institutions;global, European, national regional and local, along with its agents and intellectual cheerleaders in the media, the academy, the ‘voluntary sector’, ‘private companies’ that are largely dependent in the public purse and the arts.

Home.

How to find stuff in Citizens and Neighbours.


*‘Appropriate’ here means: actually freedom-loving rather than pretending to love it for nefarious purposes. It means; being peaceable; law-abiding and positive about equality under the law of all of Britain’s lawful residents; native subjects, naturalized incomers and temporary visitors alike. Put bluntly, the good guys won the Battle of Britain and the bad guys lost, and that’s that as far as this blog is concerned.

They're Joking. Aren't they? home.