Things usually are worse, but I’ll stand correction.
Huh?That's literally the whole parliamentary supremacy thing in a
nutshell: we want to take our sovereignty back. We want to elect a Parliament
and know that they will be able to govern the country, instead of having to go
cap in hand to a foreign power to ask 'may I'?
Maybe this is (also) a symptom of the This is the Present Year Syndrome, originating in the amygdalae of
all anatomically modern Progressives.
In a world where the most dignified predictions of the future
are movie trailers, thanks to the resolute deeds of The Agents of Progress™ the
past has been wholly erased by the Great Rainbow Squeegee : AKA The Narrative.
We’re not just talking about the Ministry of Truth rewriting
the Times to prove we have always been at war with Eastasia here.
The Nicky Morons of this
world - or more precisely her Millennial serfs - when met with “We have always
been at war with Eastasia” are less likely to counter with “But we were at war
with Eurasia last year when Eastasia were our allies,” than “What is Eastasia?”
or “What war?” or most importantly “We?”
It’s inconceivable for many Narrative-addled bitbrains that
barely 30 years ago it was controversial that a BBC TV show portrayed an
abortion in a sympathetic light just before a Parliamentary debate on that very topic. Especially
if it’s difficult to Google it on page 1. Especially so considering all the
wholesome family fun that Michelle
Fowlerand
hersuccessors
have had with that particular subject ever since.
The Restoration? That’s a TV
reality show about doing up old houses, yeah? The Bill of Rights? That’s why it’s OK for blokes in drag to piss in the cubicle nextto teenage girls in Asda and it always has been.
Things usually are worse, but I’ll stand correction.
Huh?That's literally the whole parliamentary supremacy thing in a
nutshell: we want to take our sovereignty back. We want to elect a Parliament
and know that they will be able to govern the country, instead of having to go
cap in hand to a foreign power to ask 'may I'?
Maybe this is (also) a symptom of the This is the Present Year Syndrome, originating in the amygdalae of
all anatomically modern Progressives.
In a world where the most dignified predictions of the future
are movie trailers, thanks to the resolute deeds of The Agents of Progress™ the
past has been wholly erased by the Great Rainbow Squeegee.
AKA The Narrative.
We’re not just talking about the Ministry of Truth rewriting
the Times to prove we have always been at war with Eastasia here.
The Nicky Morons of this
world - or more precisely her Millennial serfs - when met with “We have always
been at war with Eastasia” are less likely to counter with “But we were at war
with Eurasia last year when Eastasia were our allies,” than “What is Eastasia?”
or “What war?” or most importantly “We?”
It’s inconceivable for many Narrative-addled bitbrains that
barely 30 years ago it was controversial that a BBC TV show portrayed an
abortion in a sympathetic light just before a Parliamentary debate on that very topic. Especially
if it’s difficult to Google it on page 1. Especially so considering all the
wholesome family fun that Michelle
Fowlerand
hersuccessors
have had with that particular subject ever since.
The Restoration? That’s a TV
reality show about doing up old houses, yeah? The Bill of Rights? That’s why it’s OK for blokes in drag to piss in the cubicle nextto teenage girls in Asda. And it always has been.
Some individual words all by themselves strike us as just plain silly; monkey, wobble, banana, Belgium.
You can up the ante to two-word phrases that contradict themselves completely: young conservative; reality TV; moderate Islam; socialist worker; democratic centralism; TV personality.
Then for bonus bogus there’s the three-word BS phrase that just reeks of inauthenticity, such as any song lyric containing the triads; rock and roll; on the line; into the night; built this city.
But if you want to go large in modern life’s absurd oxymorons you need to go for the bigger compounds such as The Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom. I’ll stick to broadcasting today.
Polly Toynbee at the Guardian refers to it favourably. Natch.
Here we go.
The Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom is an independent voice for media reform. We work to promote policies for diverse and democratic media.
The Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom was established in 1979. For over two decades we have worked for a more accountable, freer and diverse media…
To challenge the myth that press freedom is best served by current forms of ownership and control, and by 'self-regulation' on the part of the Press Complaints Commission.
There’s paragraph after paragraph of this fertile stuff. I must stop here before I go Full Fisk and you, dear reader, click away perhaps to the many, many pictures of all the pretty ladies that the web has so selflessly provided for us all.
I’m just going to select some buzzwords beloved of the CPBF and eventually draw your attention to what they really mean:
…diverse media; Broadcasting Freedom; freer and diverse media; the principles of public service … high programme standard; cultural diversity; broadcast audiences must be treated… citizens with distinct communicative rights; freedom both from state interference; vast, unaccountable business interests; coverage that reflects a wide diversity of views and cultures; promoting positive coverage of traditionally disadvantaged and marginalised groups; a reduction in legal restrictions on media freedom…
Let us set aside for now the arguments against State broadcasting and State-controlled broadcasting. For state power is what ‘democratic’ clearly means as the CPBF in particular and the Left in general are not talking about putting up a Facebook page to decide whether Channel Four should serialise Atlas Shrugged or a British-made, non Keanu Reeves Scouse socialist version of Hellraiser instead. They aren’t going to mount a YouTube campaign to urge the BBC to re-imagine The Double Deckers as the youth outsider vigilante superhero teen romance battle-of-the-bands revenge thriller wide screen sci-fi special effects blockbuster that we all knew it was meant to be. Nope, I suspect it’s going to be some form of regularized legal force that keeps freedom and diversity alive.
It turns out that they don’t seem to have noticed how well freedom and diversity of expression did under communism and the previous German constitution. Or perhaps they have. For proof that state-controlled media support freedom and democracy, you can checkoutTASS, the enlightened Chinese system, and of course the interwar German system.
Oh, you won’t get much detail going far into the past on the Chinese and Soviet censorship on Wikipedia – which is notoriously, um, tactful about the history of everything under communism. Just look at how it doesn’t point the finger to whoever it was that built the thing, and when and why. The voluntary sector can be highly editorial too.
Let us also, dear reader, set aside any considerations that the existing democratically controlled broadcaster is, ahem, somewhat favourable to their world view already. It’s been done.
Sky and ITN scarcely squeeze out of the box (you should excuse the expression) of cultural Marxism since (unlike the US Murdoch-owned station that actually allows conservatives to speak largely uninterrupted and indeed invites them to be interviewed in equal numbers with the left and centre Left) the UK Sky simply goes along to get along and ITN blithely follow the herd (with rare exceptions.)
Channel Four does better by admitting it is left-biased. This is honest and generally good for the health of the country as it is privately-funded (mostly) and as it occasionally admits that children and liberals will need to keep their heads attached and their skins intact even under Channel Four’s hoped-for regime of democratic socialism.
Oh look. Another one.
But how real is the reality of the freedom and diversity which our Portside countrymen actually want?
As they search for reasons to be cheerful about Britain, the liberal-minded can latch on to the comforting notion that at least we do not allow the propaganda channels of American television on to our screens. We may have Jeremy Clarkson, Frankie Boyle and every other variety of media braggart and bully, but our regulators spare us a local version of Fox News….
For how much longer, I wonder. When I spoke to Tony Close, director of standards atOfcom, who is meant to enforce the code, his language was suspiciously woozy and prevaricating. Instead of enunciating the clear, hard principles, which have kept broadcasting honest, he began to babble about fostering "diversity" and granting "flexibility" to foreign broadcasters transmitting in Britain.
The foreign broadcaster he had in mind was Press TV, the state network of Iran, a hostile foreign power, whose agents have just looted the British embassy in Tehran. To describe the regime's output as more propagandistic than anything the Murdoch clan produces is to understate the case in two respects.
That's your actual Nick Cohen, that is. Nice collocation of the private ownership of broadcasting media by a conservative-tolerating station and the publicly funded and uncontrolled state broadcasting by an Islamist regime there. Got that? We’re kept safe from any UK equivalent of evil, conservative-tolerating Fox News and the reason why the protection is good is because another State broadcaster, not unlike out own dear BBC, is evilly Islamist.
Diversity and freedom for the Left in Britain (as elsewhere) means keeping the conservative voice out by using state power to prevent it ever being broadcast on anything like equal terms.
But even he wants to be ‘protected’ from broadcasting that allows conservatives to speak uninterruptedly and to offer longer than sound bite arguments for Right-of-centre ideas. Somehow freedom, diversity and high standards can be achieved whilst keeping half of the political spectrum effectively off the airwaves.
Which leads us up another alley to a version of the Polly Conundrum. :when faced with a particularly egregious statistical error, one simply asks whether the writer is a moron or a liar. When faced with anything in Comment Is Free, the answer is usually that the writer is both a moron and a liar.
But Nick Cohen and his rare but valuable ilk aren’t stupid or liars in the conventional sense.
Quite how he imagines that the Far Left; acting in cahoots with the Islamists at home and abroad in the hope that once the bombings and beheadings end they’ll step in to bring on Da Revolution will ever tolerate his powder pink defence of our lives and civilization better than honest conservatives and the last handful of true liberals left standing, I just don’t know. They are unlikely to do it at all.
And quite how preventing one entire half of the politics in the country from arguing on air that perhaps unlimited immigration might have its faults, or that welfare state has spending limits and - ah - selective success socially can ever generate diversity and freedom in the non-Pickwickian sense of those words, I’m equally stumped. But how Cohen and the few surviving other 'open-minded leftists' seem to believe that it’s all going to be alright while expecting a body politic to be healthy and breathe the fresh air of truth with only one lung is a mystery to me.
Mrs. NW and I once gave up a whole evening ( quite unasked by her) standing Adele free beers and shoulders to cry on; listening to her family woes and conspiracy theories about the bosses closing down most of the pubs to spite the workers after I’d found her muddy and bewildered… but also quite successfully talking Miroslaw at the corner shop out of a quarter bottle of handbag gin on credit.
I had lived on the same street as Adele and her then partner Ryan and knew them back before I met Mrs. Northwester. Mrs. Northwester knew her via friends of friends. Castle City is a small town. CS Lewis would recognize what Mrs. Northwester and I did. We were just being neighbourly. Not post code neighbourly you understand; but New Testament neighbourly. Or Great Rift Valley neighbourly. Take your pick.
People are often willing to be sociable - if not brainwashed out of it from birth or at adolescence - and many of us like to help nearby folk and even some not-too-strange strangers, freely, at personal cost in time and treasure and without governmental assistance or mandate. We do so with instincts descended from the ancient teamwork with which our ancestors survived the march out of Olduvai Gorge and through numerous Ice Ages with nothing but cutlery, sticks and cooperation to help them.
And still Adele wants it all for free.
Societies – particularly those with large measures of freedom and government by consent - require a wide scale predisposition from the highest to the lowest to follow the rules and treat each other right, and we are long past the point where we can rely on anything like that.
CS Lewis wrote (and I can’t find the quotations concerned right now so I’ll paraphrase) about how his Left-wing intellectual contemporaries -I think he was referring to Socialist Oxford dons and others of the 1940s and 1950’s Wise and Good - that whatever collectivist and anti-property views they taught and proselytized as being for the good of society, they would travel hundreds of miles to return a borrowed shilling.
I think I remember he also wrote something to the effect that no matter how much deep suffering they were prepared to inflict in theory in the name of Equality, etc, and no matter how much mass state violence they were prepared to tolerate in foreign policy support for the Soviet world, they themselves would act with the nicest concern for their fellow men if they knew them individually. Forced collectivization and megadeath famines under Stalin? A necessary fuelling station on the railway to The New Millennium. Let an undergraduate drink alone over the Easter vacations? Unthinkable! Sit over here old chap and tell me how your essay on The Aenead is coming along. Das Kapital and Hegel are all very well in the real world of men and machines and continents, but it was Sunday School morality and nursery-taught good manners and it’s just not done, old boy that they practised in their own neighbourhoods. That was Generation Number One. The Greatest Generation. They beat Hitler. No complaints.
But.
I’m sure there’s still a lot of this about: think of your Leftie friends, relatives and colleagues who are still good for a tenner loan on a bad ATM day or a lift to the railway station or all the way home when you’ve missed the last bus.
But hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance are not enough to keep a society healthy and free.
My hometown, “Castle City,” has a village institute. Actually, it’s an urban institute donated about the turn of the century by one of the local capitalist exploiters/millionaire philanthropist/smart boy who got lucky and rich in business and inadvertently gave Castle County’s poor folk something to do for a living other than following the south end of a northbound plough horse.
It’s been extensively done up with ‘public funds’ from wherever, ie you, and there’s a bar with good beer and food and wifi, and a small cinema where we the Skyless people can watch major football matches over a pint without the elsewhere inevitable Walkabout exchange beginning “What the f*ck are YOU looking at?” They also put on small jazz combos and Zumba lessons and stuff for the children of both the potless manual workers and the Guardianistas. Interesting stuff happens that otherwise might not happen under the commercial constraints of budget and profit margins and high local property prices. You can have a pretty peaceful time listening to the turning pages of the TES and the sweet silver voices of little Hobbesian Ayeshas, Gaias and Toms ignored by their Rousseauianparents running about and torturing each other with fire-hardened Lego and dog-eared copies of The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
Once in a while, we put on a disco.
I mean it: no embarrassment. An actual, glitter-ball bejewelled, Euro-trash and Radio Two Glam Rock standards disco, like the only enjoyable twenty minutes of a wedding night dance - except that they play the good stuff all night long; utterly free of the hot-hatchback amplified street beat of DUH-DUH-DUH!, and not a mothafucka to be heard
It’s voluntary. It’s self financing with surpluses going to local charities, with ‘security’ enforced by a rota of the musos themselves, plus yours truly and other volunteers minding the door. Teenage kicks for Generation X. This is the sound track to the Big Society, if there is such a thing; Samuel Smiles chanelling the Doors and the Stones and consisting of mostly middle class and aspirational working classes with no further state involvement. 30, 40 and 50- aged well-washed folk hopping and bopping to the Sixties, Seventies, Eighties (yey!) and Nineties. They work. They play. They pay their way.
Culturally, they should be the gatekeepers and upholders of our civilization, even if many of them obviously vote the straight Insane Platform at elections in that very hall, Dear Reader, but it’s safe as houses and never any trouble.
Except.
Except that we are all the Children of the Revolution and some of the younger ones don’t want to pay.
Most of these children of the wartime generation and the early Boomers cheerfully fork out the nominal fee to cover the running costs of the event and accept that any surplus buys new CDs and the rest is sent off to help Castle City’s actual poor. There are ticket price concessions that make admittance penny chew stuff.
But still some of them don’t want to pay.
Take Adele and Ryan. Both are lifelong hardcore Lefties and have been deeply involved over the decades in making sure that the world and Castle City don’t get too much better via their work at election times and their bureaucracies lobbying government for more government. You know the type; left their inherited wealth town house uninhabited for a few months to rent a place in the pupil catchment area of a more distant and excellent rural non-selective school so that little Che and Fidel could be get a decent education rather than sitting elitistly for examinations for Castle City’s selective school or being incarcerated in the progressive comprehensives their parents have spend a lifetime protecting from parental choice, academic excellence, formal discipline or anything else of much value. Respect, yeah?
Ryan pops in to the disco from time to time: a quite charming smiling man of the people and sometimes neglects to pay if he doesn’t see me at the ticket table. I have to pursue him and cheerfully demand that nominal fee which he does with a ‘Silly me, I must have forgotten’ grin. Adele, however, knows shame or something and once turned up late in the evening and actually asked to come in free as she’d missed the beginning. Nice try but that’ll be Generation X pounds please Adele and enjoy your dance. These are Generation Two.
Get to the point, North Northwester; I think that gangrene is setting in to my brain. There are lots of pictures of pretty ladies on the Internet and Julia’s probably posted up another storm by now.
Adele and Ryan aren’t really the villains of my tale. We’re way past them in 2011. They are only practising what they preach after all, and it will come as no surprise to readers of this blog that some Lefties are actual as well as philosophic looters. The real slope of hell, however, is unto the next generation – the undergraduate-aged ones and twentysomethings who drift into the dance hall and don’t even consider buying a ticket. They have the cheek to look hurt when I pursue them and agree that, yes, all are indeed welcome to come in from the very instant after they’ve paid peanuts and got their hands stamped they can boogie with the Flintstones of Glam. Some of them actually argue about it. We’re not talking pallid, wasted features and hollow cheeks or track-marked arms here; we’re talking shiny happy people who can’t see why they should contribute anything at all to the event except for the pleasure of their company. It’s not really ‘cheek’ at all - it’s aggrieved entitlement.
It’s the bootleg DVD mentality. It’s the illegal download generation. It’s also cultural Marxism triumphant and they don’t even know they’re doing it: from those according to their ability to those about to rock.
Logically, they aren’t wearing out the dance floor much more and they do buy drinks (when they buy drinks) and that supports the Institute’s finances, and they aren’t violating anyone’s property rights and they don’t kick off or fight; these youngsters who want a bit of retro paid for with their smiles, but they are expecting it as a right.
To recap: to work, societies - particularly those with large measures of freedom and government by consent - require a wide scale predisposition from the highest to the lowest to follow the rules and treat one another other right.
This generation has no concept of the rightness of things – that everyday manners and consideration and morality matter - and who were brought up by parents who neither understood that it was important to do so: let alone why.
Their parents have been propagandized (by Ryan and Adele’s assorted bards and filmmakers) to avoid any such ideas. CS Lewis’s Socialist colleagues and Adele and Ryan’s (and my) generation have passed to them, where in every film the West’s military are evil, where the corporations threaten life on Earth and peace and put toxic waste into puppies, and where the very notions of self-restraint on the one hand and doing the proper thing on the other are alien and hostile perversions.
These poor kids have no idea of the separation of powers; or the multiplier effect of new products put onto the market or how they get there in the first place; or the dignity of the individual (other than as a benefits entitled individual); or what privacy is for; or how important property rights are or the importance and utility of loyalties to collective arrangements such as patriotism or civic pride; let alone why traditions become so and how they. Freedom is licence. Responsibility is conditional. Duty is contractual and subject to ‘conscientious’ change at zero notice. This is Generation Three. Generation free. ‘Free’ as in free of personal cost.
These are the people who will be voting and organizing ‘protests’ and nominating prospective parliamentary candidates and writing scripts and editing the news and commissioning documentaries and teaching our children for the next forty years, if some guy named Mo doesn’t float a couple of yachts laden with Pakistani technology up the Thames and the Clyde ins’allah. They are the people that readers of this site and commentators and supporters of its mission have little or no way of getting hold of and teaching them what’s wrong with their attitude. They’ll click away if they find us, because we are toxic waste. These are the people who will squash this dream flat – and order vodka shots and text each other whilst the police and the mainstream media cut it up into bloody, ignored, reviled little pieces.
It will take decades, generations even (if we are allowed to live through them by the Greens and the green flag boys) to turn a tidal wave on which we are merely minority flotsam. We can attack at all levels, but if we don’t aim for the foundations by countering Lewis’s colleagues in the moral and cultural spheres, we’re still going to be written off (if we’re lucky) as so much human strontium ninety or its 21st century offspring, carbon dioxide.
Orphans of Liberty discusses the suggestion from a police officer that benefits keep people away from committing crime and Peter Hitchens is discomforted by the release of a career criminal so that he can spend time with his family and - presumably – also your possessions.
I think that the police officer is correct, kind of, even though it is also obvious that he’s missing the point by about one million of your Earth miles. I expect that for those individuals for whom starvation is the only alternative to crime when they are jobless, actually paying benefits will prevent crime of the stealing-bread-for-my-children variety. Not that that appears to have happened very much in the Great Depression: charity and family seem to have fielded that ball without a crime wave amongst the poor unemployed. They didn’t have much, but they weren’t, by all accounts, thieves.
Now the welfare state does the theft for their 21st Century successors via taxation and benefits and I suppose it’s less violent than mugging for bread and burglary for fresh fruit and vegetables would be. It’s not seen as theft and so, according to the morality of the majority, taxation for fairly extensive welfare provision is seen as quite moral.
So logically, while it is probably true there’d be some more family-feeding thieves if basic subsistence wasn’t provided (along with free school meals, free healthcare, free schooling, -TANSTAAFL, but you know what I mean - Child Benefit and Child Tax Credit, higher levels of help with rent and Council Tax for families), those things are provided. While I don’t think that charity and self-help and family and neighbours would fail to help out to prevent actual starvation amongst the jobless instead of extensive welfare benefits, I also don’t think there’s a cat in hell’s chance that any British electorate would vote against the continuing availability of basic welfare provision any time soon – including many amongst the ‘right.’
But that’s not the problem here. The first problem is inter-generational lawlessness, illegitimacy and welfare dependence with children growing up either (and mostly) fatherless or, as in this quite rare case, with a repeat felon as their only role model.
Such children use up and yet often don’t benefit much from disproportionately high levels spending in education: child psychologists; special classroom assistants; case workers from half a dozen “agencies”, and are the bane of their classmates’ and teachers’ lives as they disrupt most or every lesson if they attend school and everyone else’s if they play truant. Nice of this crook to stick around with those who seem to be his genetic offspring
Then they grow up [(or rather they grow large) and become half-criminal disturbers of the peace and serial welfare parents themselves. They will use up police and court resources and waste acres of paper and months of administrative time as they career clumsily and negligently through the benefits system; racking up debts to landlords and to the benefit-paying agencies as they are overpaid benefits to which they were not entitled because they actively defrauded the system of negligently failed to report changes in their circumstances that would have reduced their overall entitlement. The they create more children themselves as the marginal gain from receiving of benefits is higher as more children arrive, and so we have to support and “raise” – read suppress – those children with all of the above, and disturbed peace and squalor and increasing levels of malnutrition and disease.
And then they go on to suck up more and more resources as hopeless and amoral physical adults who never, ever contribute anything to the society that has supported them throughout their lives.
I don’t think that the right or the libertarians have much chance of persuading MPs to reduce the high and general levels of entitlements, but I can see how they might influence them to break the cycle of crime and welfare dependency by a couple of easy measures: a three strikes and you’re out policy for crimes against property and persons (and sack the magistrate or judge who refuses to sentence accordingly) and the limiting of child-related benefits to help with two children per mother per lifetime – see how Kylie likes the idea of sleeping around and “falling pregnant” knowing she’s going to have to foot the bill for little Chardonnay-Steffie #3 or Tyson-Staffy #3 out of her Income Support or Jobseeker’s Allowance.
Of course, we’d have to dismantle the human rights legislation and amend the welfare and tax credits laws in the teeth of a howling Civil Service and ‘independent judiciary’ and an almost-united welfarist establishment, but if a certain political party actually thought it might gain votes, seats, and stay in government that way, then backbenchers might just go for it.
Of course, next those backbenchers would have to get that into the party manifesto and then persuade the Prime Minister to allow its enactment.
Which isn’t likely, given what this Prime Minister lets the criminals get away with because he’s on the other side in the culture wars.
The Christian owners of a guesthouse who restrict double rooms to married couples have been ordered to pay £3,600 in damages to a homosexual couple, but leave to appeal has been granted.
The Christian owners of a guesthouse who restrict double rooms to married couples have been ordered to pay £3,600 in damages to a homosexual couple, but leave to appeal has been granted.
Earlier today His Hon. Judge Andrew Rutherford declared it was unlawful for Peter and Hazelmary Bull to operate their policy and deny a double room to civil partners Martyn Hall and Steven Preddy.
The judge ruled that under the Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations, introduced under the previous Government, civil partnerships must be treated in the same way as marriage.
It’s official, the management has no right to refuse would-be customers according to their own wishes and thus to freely enjoy their own property because the cultural Marxists will at all times impose their ideology on ever-greater areas of life.
This is why the culture wars matter more than anything else.
To law and order conservatives: you’re not going to be protected by people who don’t accept that individuals are guilty – rather that they rebel against an unjust society.
To Atlanticist conservatives: you’re not going to protect the Anglosphere with people who don’t believe in the Special relationship – or international defence at all
The Washington Post once again demonstrates the intellectual rigour, historical awareness and exquisite moral judgment for which liberalism in its modern form is justly famous.
What's threatening about European attacks on fascist uniforms.
BELGIUM'S PARLIAMENT is so polarized along linguistic lines that it has been unable to agree on a government for much of the past three years. At the moment it is ruled by a caretaker coalition. But the deputies managed to achieve near-unanimity this week on one pressing issue: discriminating against Germans. A law passed by the lower house would ban the wearing of full Nazi uniform in any public place -- and exacerbate what is becoming an ugly European trend.
Like many of its neighbors, Belgium has a significant minority German population -- about 3 percent of a population of 10 million. Like those neighbors, it has done a poor job of integrating German immigrants, and many cluster in ghettos that can be breeding grounds for extremism. This is a serious and complex problem. But too often the response of governments has been bigotry directed at immigrants or Germans as a whole -- which serves only to further alienate even non-fascist members of the community.
Belgium's swastika ban is a good example. The law prohibits any wearing of Nazi symbols with a punishment for violators of a week in jail or a fine of up to $34. Some supporters claim it is an anti-crime measure, but its chief sponsor, Daniel Bacquelaine, hasn't hesitated to describe it as an act of cultural warfare. "The swastika," he was quoted by Reuters as saying, "is the affirmation of a number of values that are contrary to fundamental values and universal values."
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who is promoting a similar ban in his country, is equally blunt: "The swastika has no place in France," he has said. Foreign fascist rulers must have been pleased to hear those words: Paris will now have no cause for complaint when countries with Christian or Jewish minorities ban the cross or the yarmulke.
The anti-swastika cause is sweeping Europe. In addition to Belgium and France, Italy and the Netherlands are considering bans. Yet the targets of these measures are virtually nonexistent. Mr. Bacquelaine estimates that a couple of hundred people in Belgium wear full storm trooper uniforms. In France, one study estimated that there are 1,900 swastika wearers in a German population of 5 million.
The idea that this poses a criminal or cultural threat is ludicrous. Those who say they are defending people's rights have it exactly backward: They are violating fundamental rights to free expression and political freedom. They are also exacerbating the very problem they say they are worried about. Germans, including devoted fascists, are in Europe to stay. Banning their marches, their regalia or their outdoor rallies will not make them more European. It will only make Europe less free.
The problem with The Left is that they don’t care.
Oh, they care all right about their fellow men - with a few designated exceptions who are beyond the pale - and often do a great deal to improve the lives of those whom they touch. But they are at a stage now in their ascendancy (read ‘hegemony’ if you agree with me that The Left includes the leadership of the Tory Party) where the way things are out in the phenomenal world, as well as the cognitive world, can not exist if they contradict their big picture.
If you can’t be bothered to read them now – it’s a work day and many of you must be busy about your morning devotions or hoping that the antacids are going to be effective today or that The Pill was last night – here are some tasters; taken totally out of context and utterly unrelated to any connections that the writers might have to radical or militant groups:
We can only wonder at the Gramscian genius of those who have carried out this semantic inversion. To want to preserve your parliamentary democracy is extreme; to want to give more power to unelected functionaries is moderate. To consult the people is swivel-eyed; to connive at their disfranchisement is level-headed. To keep your promise of a referendum is obsessive; to break it is sensible. To have kept the pound was xenophobic whereas to have subjected Britain to the chaos now overtaking the euro-zone would have been… oh, you get my point…
This argument is too big, too important, to be reduced to an intra-party row.
And
One of Brown and Darling's favourite wheezes was to hide government liabilities 'off balance sheet' - the same kind of notorious business practice that led to the bankruptcy of the Enron energy trading concern almost ten years ago and Lehman investment bank in 2008.
They did this through the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), whereby the government built hospitals, schools and other public enterprises using money borrowed from the private sector which will have to be paid back like mortgages over a long period…..
In all, I guess that the black hole at the heart of the Treasury accounts as a result of 13 years of New Labour fraud and neglect is not far short of £2 trillion, or about £40,000 for every family in Britain.
And
Once the long term casts its chill shadow on present expectations, investors are shocked - shocked - to encounter financial scams that they previously had ignored. Estimates are now circulating in the press that the United Kingdom actually has public debt equal to 150% of its GDP, rather than the 53% figure usually reported, if unfunded pension fund liabilities are taken into account.
That is the future cost of caring for at least part of the United Kingdom's aging population valued in present pounds. The same could be said for California, whose unfunded pension liability might be $450 billion rather than the $50 billion reported, depending on whether one expects the funds to earn 8% a year, as the pension funds claim, or only earn the government bond yield. That is just a complicated way of saying that if the bubble continues forever, everything will be fine, but if it doesn't, everything will go pear-shaped.
And
Contrary to Mr Purnell's assertion, Labour's debt pile-up preceded the credit crunch. As a state, we had become addicted to the never-never. In 2003, the Budget deficit was £28 billion, then £33 billion in 2004, £32 billion in 2005, £36 billion in 2006, £34 billion in 2007 and £43 billion in 2008.
From 2003-2008 inclusive, the Chancellor's overspend as a percentage of the Government's annual outlay ranged between 5.8 per cent and 7 per cent, with the average being 6.4 per cent. In his 2008 Budget, Alistair Darling predicted GDP growth of 1.75-2.25 per cent, yet still planned to borrow £43 billion.
This is a core structural deficit, which has nothing to do with the financial crisis "that began in America", as Mr Brown likes to incant. It was akin to a family with a weekly income of £500 spending £532 every week for six years. At first, the process is not ruinous, but trouble accumulates until something unexpectedly bad happens – then, the finances whizz out of control.
Now, the above doom-mongering is not based on top-secret information: most of it is published by the government and discussed in Parliament though some of it has indeed been sleight-of-hand shifted out of sight. But you don’t have to go to a Whitehall cocktail party disguised as the Ecuadorian ambassador’s wife, break into the Treasury’s state-of-the-art security programme with hacking software from a key card hidden in your powder compact, kick box a couple of beret-wearing security guards unconscious and download the data to a secure CIA server in a safe house in Marseilles to find out where much of these figures are from.
Curiously, great national institutions tasked with looking for, presenting and discussing such weighty matters; such as our national broadcaster seem to be uninterested in all this dry as bones economic stuff.
You might remember the many hagiographical farewell statements by Labour MPs and other Leftie politicians that were allowed to go on uninterrupted since Gordon Brown resigned as Prime Minister – at least uninterrupted by questions like But isn’t this the man whose housing bubble, financial regulation with a light touch and public sector spending spree have laid waste to the public finances and encouraged the once-thrifty British people to get into massive personal debt?
What’s going on here?
In the past few weeks I’ve encountered Left-wing people of various stripes dismissing national bankruptcy with a wave of the hand on one occasion and silence and a swift subject change on the other. A couple of them have expressed the certainty that with the Tories in all our jobs will go and one who said they’d never vote Tory and others still have stated the European Union could have been a loose free-trading Federation in line with Britain if only Mrs. Thatcher had negotiated better and another smiling at the possibility of UKIP and the BNP’s vote keeping the Tory candidate from Westminster enough times to prevent Mr. Cameron having an absolute majority: Right-wingers are just a few, powerless cranks on the fringes or (depending whether you’re Liberal or Reformed), secretly running the ConDem coalition to favour Big Business or The Military or Whoever it is that conservatives really work for.
These are good people: the folk who are making Britain work – to the extent that Britain is working at all - in the public and private sectors. These are the folk in charge and with the money time and motivation to effect politics as well as taking part in political discourse.
And yet the facts of the matter become moonshine as soon as political belief comes into play.
Let’s a few of take paraphrases:
‘Oh, bankrupt!’
I’m not sure here whether the fact are held to be irrelevant or untrue, but they could be easily checked, so whatever’s going on here either implies that national bankruptcy is no big deal (perhaps when there are children in Africa starving or whatever) or whether it isn’t going to happen because the wrong kind of messenger is giving the message, but all those noughts that the commentators above are discussing are, well, worth nowt for some reason.
‘I could never in my life vote Tory.’
Again, I can understand a person being soured for a long time by a party’s earlier actions, as in my youth I was by Labour’s previous thorough economic rape of Britain, and as I currently am with the hilariously-named Conservative Party. But the way we are governed really matters in that it has real-world effects and here’s an active, philanthropic, utterly decent pillar of the community (way up the social scale from petit bourgeois me I should point out) stating implicitly that if a formerly disliked and wrong-headed party changed much of its personnel and all of its policies to ones with which such a person could now agree, and even if that party alone subsequently proposed measures clearly tending to the public good and even to national salvation and all the others proposed to continue in folly, then they still would not do so due to that earlier prejudice.
‘…before Cameron’s axe falls on us all.’
Really? I mean, did he ever look at the Tories’ pre-election spending plans? Can’t he at least look for the string of noughts mentioned above and see that little Georgie Osborn’s ‘cuts’ were, with multiple symbolism, intended to be mere pin-pricks: and that’s before the LibDems decided to sign my daughter’s soul into a longer period of debt slavery by producing this grey buffet of economic finger-food and snot-filled pastry cases.
As for the others; read the Treaty of Rome, which, like The Koran, Das Kapital and Mein Kampf can be read in translation so you can see what their authors said, what they did from the start, and compare words and actions to discover how those words were interpreted and thus to understand where we’re all going with this; look closely at the ‘ever-closer union’ phrase as the motor of a movement that Mrs. Thatcher could never have turned around into a mere free-trading negotiating bloc and customs union.
Also look at the EU referendum post about UKIP and, ahem, another Eurosceptic party’s success in keeping Cameron out of Number Ten in his own right.
I don’t suppose for a minute that any amount of factual persuasion – in the sense of asking people of the leftist mind-set to research the facts and think about them, and to compare the names and labels of the parties and their slogans and boasts with what’s actually going on in the world – will change most of their minds much about any of this stuff. One or two maybe, but it’s a lot of prejudice to overcome.
The reason that the Left in all its glory doesn’t care, deep down, about facts you can describe with numbers or demonstrate with eye-witness accounts or by reading original texts, is that long ago the culture war was won by the Left: so much so that its members are unwilling to look contradictory facts in the face, as it were, because the facts tell a different story from their orthodoxy. Facts such as those above are to be treated as blasphemous because they can show a reality that is heretical.
So: first offenders sent to prison after their first conviction for something minor will surely come out knowing how to burgle homes and offices better than when they went in as old lags show them how in exchange for drugs or sexual favours. Children who are encouraged to order their own learning and provided with enough books and other resources and the minimum of guidance will usually do so and thus not require whole class teaching in specific subjects or the structure of a teacher at the front of the class: they will certainly not major in sand pit and Wendy house if left alone. Immigrants will always import new arts and crafts and music styles and delicious new cuisines and never the home country attitudes that have made migration to racist Hell-hole Britain so attractive in comparison that they’ll risk the violence of armed police and traffickers, suffocation in ships’ inner hulls, containers and lorries, and being trafficked as meat and shark-infested seas.
Life’s like that: it’s not any other way. It just can’t be.
And that’s the rub: it’s why teaching unions will never accept parental choice and the BBC will neveraskwhatright a government has to tax sugary drinks to restrict consumption or why it might be harmful to peoples’ lives for Britain to enter into international unions with other economically unstable states: we’re not dealing with a political movement her but rather a religion.
And all that means that we on the Right are in trouble.
You don’t have to allow unbelievers free speech uninterrupted by orthodox counter-comments and interruptions during ‘news’ programmes. You aren’t obliged to hire contrary views when you pick new History Fellows or social studies professors for your university. You don’t have to think about the source and the scarcity of public funds when subsidizing trade union renewal or deciding which non-governmental organisations will receive your generous support for the next fiscal year.
Our rulers are in church, and we must stay respectfully silent.
However it is that we on the Right might seek to build a governing party or coalition, it isn’t going to occur on anything like a level playing field: that possibility died years ago.
Quite how we’re going to get through to the people who alone might one day vote our faithful owners out now that heresy hunting is all but official policy in the media and educational classes, I’m not sure.
