Yesterday I went down to the library in my hometown of Kettering, Northamptonshire.
There was a big display with a lot of ‘politically correct’ language – all about ‘sustainable development’ and other such. But when I worked out what it was all about it turned out to be the council’s plan for the Kettering area.
Exactly how many new houses, business enterprises and jobs there were to be was laid out (a bit like Gosplan from the old Soviet Union). The fact that it is impossible for some ‘plan’ to calculate the ‘correct’ level of all these things (something that Ludwig Von Mises pointed out in 1920) was ignored.
Nor was the possibility that government (in this case local government) should not provide all the roads, drainage, and other such that such developments demand. Of course the only way to judge if someone really thinks that a development is viable is to see whether they are willing to pay for everything (roads, drainage… and the maintenance of such things) themselves – if they are not it is a con.
In short the old unholy alliance between private developers and government (i.e. taxpayer) subsidies…even the Soviets did not have that. All in contradiction to the promises that the town and county councillors got elected on (i.e. that they would oppose such ‘development’.
The level of ‘research’ and ‘knowledge’ that the council has is shown by the picture of the building they choose to illustrate their plans for the centre of Kettering (presently, years after the present administration came to power, the ‘one way’ and road blockage system is still driving customers to other towns and divides the town into two parts, north and south, that are virtually cut off from each other) – the picture was of a building, and not even a very good building, that is miles outside of the centre of Kettering in south Kettering (a few hundred yards from my home).
Almost needless to say the whole display included a lot of words about the ‘environment’ (the environment that the developments would be built on I suppose).
It is a rerun of the trash collection scam. Lots of different coloured waste bins and a collection (of one or more of the coloured bins) only once every two weeks, rather than every week for one bin – all in the name of the “environment” (although all the carefully separated, on the pain of punishment, trash is then mixed together again because the council has no way of disposing of it separately). The whole scam costs a fortune and is a health hazard due to trash rotting for two weeks in bins – or being spread about when they get knocked over.
If attacked on any of the above local councillors will just blame national or European Union regulations and they may well be right, but I suspect that it is not a matter of where the government plan comes from, it is a matter of it being a government plan that is the problem.
Meanwhile the councilors concern themselves with another project. After wasting large amounts of taxpayer’s money on (daft) changes to the Town Hall, they now plan to waste millions on building a new Town Hall, or whatever politically correct name they come up with for it, someone miles out of town…I suppose they want to hide somewhere isolated so that angry people can not find them or the local government officers.
I have not mentioned what political party controls Kettering town council and Northamptonshire county council – but it does not really matter. The ‘Chief Executive’ (what we used to call the Town Clerk) and his deputy chief executives and other senior local government officers control everything – and they do so on the basis of various local and national regulations and policies.
Local councilors cannot even oppose these people as any written or verbal counter attack could be seen as ‘bringing the council into disrepute’ by the Local Government Standards Board – this body has hit councilors in other places for daring to speak against the administrators.
This is what it is like living in a ‘planned society’ like Britain, people who have something to lose do not tend to speak out.
Scary stuff, Paul, but I think it is common.
I suspect the Town Hall will be sold off under market price, renovated (if beautiful) into luxury apartments and offices in some deal to “encourage” the developer of the out-of-Town Hall to get off their backsides and build it. In the end the developer gets rich, the residents lose out and the town is poorer for it. Cynical? Me?
Indeed, housing is subsidised in this way. It also applies to out-of-town office complexes which indirectly rely on roads to deliver their workers.
If I were a developer, I would apply to build a railway and connected trolley ways at the stops and above the entire railway I would have flat factories and near the stops offices, housing and business premises. The MTR in Hong Kong does much of this already, with each station being a massive office, shopping and residential project. Utterly logical and making the most of and paying for much of the infrastructure.
Still, there is hope. We have (many years later) the Oyster Card, a clone of the HK Octopus, so maybe TfL will consider the MTR’s other wisdom.
Let’s not rush to eulogise the Oyster card though, since it’s esentally a means of levying financial penalties on those who prefer not to submit to having their movements logged.
Novus – your’s is a “guns are bad” type of argument AFAICT.
I do not understand.
They’re doing exactly the same thing here in Dumfries. They’ve spent tons of money on ‘consultants’ (scam artists more like) to come up with a plan for regenerating the town center, which is a morass of, pound shops, charity shops and empty shops.
The fact that the town center is in this state because they gave planning permission to no less than three metal box retail parks on the outskirts of town seems to be completely beyond their comprehension.
The only part of the plan that got council approval was the repaving of the street which I live on, which will do nothing towards regeneration but will disrupt the activities of residents and retailers on that street. Not tom mention the fact that its completely unnecessary.
As ever the public were ‘consulted’, ie told what was going to happen and then ignored when we objected.
They don’t seem to realise that they are the problem. Business rates in the town center are prohibitive (being more than the rent in alot of cases) and it is that which stops small busniesses opening up in the town not the state of the paving.
I knew a guy who used to have a tiny bookshop. No more than a cupboard really. which he rented from the council as it was part of a council building (this one) There was barely enough room for two people to stand and browse the bookshelves and obviously no water services and yet he was charged the full whack of rates (about £250 a week) including water charges.
In my opinion our council is either incompetent or corrupt, possibly even both. They couldn’t plan a piss up in a brewery, though they would try and spend loads of money on it, and all we’d get is a can of special in a playground.
Sorry for the rant I went on longer than I meant to.
I think he means that its not the system that is at fault but the people making use of it to log peoples movements.
“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” kind of thing.
I’ve been playing on the BBC “Have your say” on the proposal to give local authorities more power, and found this:
“The whole point of government is to have professionals do whats best for us, not what we want, because frankly most of us aren’t responsible enough to make the best decisions.
[Peter_Sym], Nottingham “
When there are people about who (seem to) genuinely believe this, we’ve had it.
I have always imagined that this idea of having offices out of town is on the lines of the DVLA being in Swansea and my tax lot being in Cumbernauld (Glasgow). They work on the basis that if going to thump them is a chore, you won’t do it.
I live in Northampton, and the inability of the council to do anything sensible is legendary.
While we’re on anecdotes (the singular of data, as we all know), I recently visited a picture-framing shop in a middle-size Scottish town. At some point the owner excused himself and said he was popping next door (to his house) to visit the loo.
What, I said, you don’t have a toilet in the shop?
No, he said, we took it out because it added £2000 a year to the business rates, and the shop can’t cover that.
I suppose all those fancy offices have to be paid for somehow…
There are many people closer at hand to thump them. Those offices are there to buy statist votes, and help distribute taxpayers money in disguised regional aid. Hence the Revenue payments centre in Bradford, and Contributions Agency in Newcastle, the Girobank in Bootle. Some of these offices have to be somewhere, but the particular geographical spread is not determined by straightforward organisational logic.
Sorry, Perry and all for my oblique. Mandrill has it nailed.
mandrill,
Have you checked out the planning application for the IPS interrogation centre in Dumfries?
At midday we had a spokeswoman for the “Local Council Reform white paper” on Daily Politics (It appears Ruth Kelly was not available).
It seems only minor powers are to be transfered from the centre, but NEW powers especially of the fundraising/fines kind are to be given to councils.
So all the talk of decentralisation because the UK is so centralized is being performed in true Sociofascist style by levelling down. Too much power in the centre? Increase power in the regions…’increase’, mind, not ‘transfer to’.
That is like saying bright kids get better schooling, so lets have equality – make them have bad schooling like all the others. Pure Socialism.
Paul Marks “The fact that it is impossible for some “plan” to calculate the “correct” level of all these things “.
Yes indeed. And as for the phrase ‘sustainable development’, well it would be a sight more sustainable (in the terms that statists mean it) did not the collective underwrite everything from disposing of old fridges (local authority refuse collection and landfill) to mass car ownership (taxpayer funded road programmes).
And while I am on the subject, if Davis Cameron really wanted to be conservative in the environmental sense that he claims to espouse, he could do no better than advocating an entirely free market where the cost of any non-criminal activity is allowed to lie where it falls: you want roads, you contract with road owners to pay for their use; supermarket plastic packaging? buy yourself a plot of land to fill up; water supplies? put a butt on your roof and install a water purifier.
And for the pragmatists out there (i.e. hedgers), if this is too extreme, club together with your neighbours to make these things more affordable. At least that level of localism is likely to be more responsive to waste and carelessness than distant government authorities.
You think you’ve got it bad? We’re going to be forced to rival New York.
http://www.wirralwaters.com/main.html
Whilst I agree with the thrust of the argument, this part, which I admit is not central to the argument, I find confusing:
‘It is a rerun of the trash collection scam. Lots of different coloured waste bins and a collection (of one or more of the coloured bins) only once every two weeks, rather than every week for one bin – all in the name of the “environment” (although all the carefully separated, on the pain of punishment, trash is then mixed together again because the council has no way of disposing of it separately).’
Whist it is true that more potentially recyclable waste is disposed of each fortnight in the coloured bins than can be handled by the recycling and composting facilities available to some local authorities, the first port of call for the waste is transfer stations which redistribute it to the appropriate waste management facilities. It is not simply mixed together again and landfilled or incinerated as the above seems to suggest. There are plenty of ways of disposing of it separately and they are utilised to capacity in order for local authorities to reach their landfill reduction targets and that the nation complies with it’s obligations under the EU Landfill Directive especially with regard to green waste.
If you have any evidence for the above claim then I would be fascinated to read it as to the best of my knowledge waste segregation at source is not a scam in anything like way suggested although it cannot possibly solve the non-probelm it purports to solve.
Cheers,
Leigh
“When there are people about who (seem to) genuinely believe this, we’ve had it”
There are and we have.
Thaddus is right. We had a troll on this blog for a year or so called Euan Gray who more or less believed we peasants needed to have lots of rules and regulations to prevent the sky falling in. The sad thing, I think he was sincere.
The White Paper TimC refers to is available here. Its favourite adjective appears to be “strong”. Is soft fascism hardening up?
Much of it is built round the co-option or displacement of what remains of civil society by Local Strategic Partnerships and a Local Area Agreement, for social management and control to match the long established planning systems Paul is posting about. “Local government as effective leader and place shaper,” yet. Governmentality.
Naturally there’s a strong emphasis in the document on encouraging people to report or indoctrinate (as “advocates”) their neighbours, and all sorts of new acronymic bodies. Representative passage:
***“The whole point of government is to have professionals do whats best for us, not what we want, because frankly most of us aren’t responsible enough to make the best decisions.
[Peter_Sym], Nottingham “***
The disingenuous part of the statement above, of course, that such people rarely include themselves in the conditional “most” of “most of us”. Generally they believe they are part of the minority to whom the thuggery shouldn’t be applied. THEY are exempted. Of course they don’t complete the thought explicitely.
***When there are people about who (seem to) genuinely believe this, we’ve had it.***
Yes we have.
At the risk of being a blogroach, it is the same mentality that breeds the type that I agrued with a few weeks back. In discussing state forced transfers for health care, I was told that supporting a free market for health care is tantamount to a Logan’s Run-esque dystopia, where we callously dispose of anyone over 80 (patently statist mindset the “we” do anything of the sort).
Of course it is the exact opposite, as resources being limited, health care will be rationed by state bureaucrats who will use some rationale other than means-based to determine who will get health care. Does it take much imagination that the more youthful will win out for access (universal health care for children is now being tossed about in the States)? The template is already in place with donated organs, which the State feels is its place to regulate, and further, discussing the propriety of “giving” scarce organs to elderly people. “They’re gunna die soon anyway” is the reasoning.
Meanwhile a free market system will allow anyone with the means to pay for care, regardless of age, and the means can acquired through a myriad of ways with that comports with the varying (and conflicting) systems of values inherent in society instead of one draconian, black and white, Statist valuation.
The gist being that our supposed superiors are anything but. Anyone who cares to set aside the basic economic reality of scarcity can then imagine any sort of utopia while bringing down the dystopian future themselves, and such characters patting themselves on the back for their wise munificence the whole time.
This is the full flower of such held belief systems cited above. Free markets are dystopian, collectivized/bureaucratized management is idyllic. Again, in an unbounded universe of unlimited resources, and where production is a given, all that truly remains is for our betters to share and fair it. At gun point. If enough force is used, everyone will be above average.
At the end of the day you just can’t argue with a diseased Statist mind. One might as well argue a person out of their religion.
Thre scariest thing about local planning is that your economic future is being decided by bored housewives and control freaks too mediocre (or indeed downright thick) to get into national politics.
Ah, Euan Gray! Haven’t heard that name for a while. The really dangerous thing about Euan (and his ilk) is that he would always start off so reasonably…
James, absolutely. What I found maddening about Euan is that he had no axioms on which to ground his views. (Mind you, he is hardly alone in that). He basically took the view that if the majority of the public wanted X, then so be it. He called it “pragmatism”. You could not really argue with him or change his mind, since he had no benchmark to measure his views against. What counted for him was whether a point of view was popular or not, not whether it was correct. I recall long and pointless exchanges with him on things like natural rights, tax and so forth. It was a waste of time. Paul Marks called him a troll and he suddenly left.
Guy, IPS interrogation center? Do tell, and link if there is one.
James, they always start out reasonably and before you realise what they’re up to you have ID cards, CCTV everywhere and laws regulating when you can go to the bog. Their very reasonableness is one of their main weapons, that and manipulation of the education system so as to produce exam passing automata (is that the plural of automaton?) who have no ability to think for themselves.
Guy. scratch that last, found it on my own and have contacted Geraint. Thanks for the heads up.
Johnathan wrote:
I know this is a touch pedantic, but can a troll be sincere, and can the sincere be trolls?
Best regards
Brad has made some very interesting and good points; however, I cannot agree with this one:
Statism, and all aspects of government, are concerned with “worldly affairs”. Much as some (perhaps many here) dislike and disagree with the concept, religion is (I think primarily) concerned with the eternal, and with the implications of our “worldly” activities on our eternal souls (whatever that might mean).
Statists, diseased and healthy (may they all hang, and soon), should not be given a protection they do not deserve.
Best regards
The “man in Whitehall” does NOT know best (there was actually a saying among among social democrat Labour party people like Crosland that the Civil Service (“the men in Whitehall” knew best) – and neither does the Local Government Officer in the Town Hall (however nice they may be).
People should not use the the threat of violence to take other people’s money or order them about – well at least if the goal is something as dumb as local government “economic and social plan”.
Robert lives in Northampton – used to be a nice town. Then it was made a centre of development (national and local government policy) and got “developed” – a nice market town with villages near by got turned into the largest “noncity” in England. Lots of “estates” and other such.
Peterborough (to the east of Kettering) was hit by “New Town status” almost as bad. Once the “Soke” of Peterborough had no local council and was not part of any county either – “but how did it survive such anarchy” – actually it was quite a peaceful place.
“But this was in ancient times” – no, it was up till the 20th century (the H.Q. of the volunteer Fire Brigade can be found near the bus station).
It is possible to (somehow) resist some of the “planning” and other regulations. “Bloody Minded” Stamford up the road from me (although the county line in Lincolshire) has a long reputation for doing this. Even back in the 19th century local landowners refused to sell their land for a east coast mainline railway (and blocked efforts in Parliament to force them to sell).
This did not harm “economic development” – the line just went through Peterborough instead. But the locals in Stamford kept their town the way they liked it (it is well worth a visit – and so is Burghley house a short walk away, although that closes at the end of October) and they have been doing that ever since.
Oh the point about councils making all sorts of threats to people to make them seperate their trash and put X in one colour bin and Y in another colour bin (four colours in the case of Kettering) – and then having shoving all the trash back together again.
Not my discovery – Christopher Booker found it out (writes in the Sunday Telegraph).
He is fond of finding things out and exposing lies (for example the lies of one of Britian’s “E.U. Commissionaires” Peter Mandleson (spelling) that E.U. regulations only apply to goods and services that are exported (broadcast by the B.B.C. Radio 4 on its “P.M.” show).
The trouble is that few people in Britian care about such things any more (care in the sense of being prepared to do something). We know that we are beat – Britain is not going to recover.
“But you can vote for the opposition party” – who do you think controls Kettering council and Northamptonshire County Coucil?
The wild (and no doubt wildly expensive) scheme to turn Birkenhead into a collection of towers did draw my eye.
The “planners” never learn. If there is money to be spent (if the taxpayers must be robbed) the local and national government could start by rebuilding some of the fine structures destoyed by the German airforce in World War II. I know Liverpool still has a lot of good Classical and Gothic buildings – but it used to have others which the Germans destoyed.
Birkenhead I do not know (although I have seen it from a ferry), but I doubt that Frank Field M.P. will support the city in the clouds idea.
Of course the government (local and national) is busy stealing privately owned houses in Liverpool and pulling them down (and then giving the land to developers).
It is as if Martin Anderson’s “The Federal Bulldozer” (1965) had never been written.
There are many books on the mess the planners have made of Britian (oddly enough the various Town and Country Planning Acts were bought in after WWII partly in the name of protecting places from poor developent – but before “planning” there was no great habit of replacing buildings with structures inferior to what was destroyed, this happened after planning came in). The “Sack of Bath” is one book that springs to mind – but Roger Scruton’s “England: A Eulogy” is a perhaps all that needs to be read on this.
However, one must not go too far. There is still much to be seen in the United Kingdom (I say United Kingdom because I am well aware of the many fine things in Scotland, Wales and Ulster – although I have not seen as many of them as I would like to, for example I have never been to Dumfries).
Kettering is not a good a town as it once was (the book “Old Kettering and its Defenders” tells the story), with such things as the old Grammar School torn down (they hit it one Sunday in 1965 – on a Sunday so that people could not complain), but I have seen what the planners intended to do to Kettering and they did not get all their own way (they wanted to create a nightmare place).
Progess (to me anyway) does not just mean “change”, it means improvment. If a new building is not better than the one it replaces the old one should not be replaced (ditto with everything else).
Nor should political fads dictate things.
There is an old history of this. For example, way back in the 18th century the Tories and Whigs of Stamford met in two rival pubs. The Whig pub was higher up a hill than the Tory pub, but they could not look down on the Tories (as they wanted to) because a fine old Church was in the way.
The Whigs tried to use local government power to have the Church torn down – but the local people would not accept it, and the Church stands to this day (“Bloody Minded” Stamford goes back a long way – but then it was one of the Viking towns).
Modern “planning” is based on no better thing than the whim of one political faction to look down on another.
I have no objection to “planned towns” (not every town has to grow up over the centuries – Hayek cultural evolution style) as long as someone has planned them that way because that is what he actually likes (rather than building something in a style he would not live in himself), and has not stolen any money to build the town.
One regret I have from my time in Bolton is that I did not go over and see Port Sunlight (not just for the Lady Lever art gallery, but for the whole idea of the town (there are several company towns in Britian, or what were company towns). But then there were many things in the general area I could have seen and did not (I had the demented notion I might get a teaching qualification, and so wasted my time rather than going to see places of interest).
One last point on the unintended consequences of planning statutes.
Portmeirion (the interesting place in Wales that most people know from “The Prisoner” television series) was created by Clough Williams-Ellis.
As a socialist (although one of a rather romantic type -as Welsh socialists often are) Williams-Ellis strongly supported the Town and Country Planning Acts. One day he was busy further developing his great labour of love (Portmeirion) when an official arrived – Mr William-Ellis had not applied for “planning permission” for further work on Portmeirion.
Such “permission” had not been needed when Williams-Ellis had started work in 1926 – but thanks to the Acts he had supported he was no longer his own master.
I know I’m late to this one, but I must point out that, for all the ideological satisfaction, and intoxicating power, of being a part of these grandiose schemes, there are also some more mundane motivations.
Whenever any political entity starts handing out contracts and hiring consultants and asking for design proposals, you can pretty much bet on there being a steady flow of little white envelopes, or bigger manilla ones, from all the eager contract seekers to all those high minded politicos.
It also doesn’t hurt to check on how many wives, brothers, uncles, and other assorted friends and relatives are suddenly employed in high paying liason jobs that seem to have very little actual work assigned to them.
Statists also like statist proposals and solutions because there’s a lot of loose change floating around. Government projects are like slot machines that always pay off—just keep pulling that lever, and the money comes pouring out.
Guy, IPS interrogation center? Do tell, and link if there is one.
For those still in the dark, see here.
Paul Marks:Progess (to me anyway) does not just mean “change”, it means improvment.
Hear hear! And “spending” should be “investment”, “choice” should be “freedom”.
The word “reform” will end up having an alternate meaning when NL has finished with it – “Bugger up”.
Places I’d like to see: Saltaire, Bourneville, Port Sunlight, Portmerion and dare I say it, Poundbury as a comparison. Something in my head says I will like Saltaire the most…not sure why.
TimC: I did say that the Oyster card was a means of levying financial penalties […]. Of course the people making use of the system, and not the system itself, are at fault: but only in the sense that those people implemented the system as opposed to the system implementing itself. The Oyster card would be fine, for example, if you didn’t have to supply reams of personal information in order to get one which is then registered to you.
Novus – last time I looked you can get an Oyster without registering.
from the Communities and Local Government webshite: “The aim of this White Paper is to give local people and local communities more influence and power to improve their lives”
The assumption being that it is only through the coercive power of government that people can improve their lives. Sickening.
What about “America Alone,” by fellow New Hampsherite Mark Steyn?
Paul, maybe I’ll comment here on appropriate occasions on the progression of Wirral Waterworld. I think the project is scheduled for the next 30 or 40 years i.e. the rest of my life…great! Port Sunlight sounds like a good idea for a bike ride sometime soon though.
I dunno. The state is often wrong, but it can also get things right. Ditto for the people. Coming from a place where the state has gotten more things right than wrong(especially in the planning of housing estates back in the day, rather than relying on the private market and evolution, which would have been a disaster), I can understand why people think the state is always the answer.
You think those government bureaucrats really want to make life hell for the people they’re supposed to be governing? Nah, they’re just do-gooders who unfortunately have no idea of how to go about actually doing good. Don’t blame them for being bureaucrats; just blame them for being stupid.
The trick, then, is to have some form of feedback system that is effective in indicating when the wrong decisions are made, to reverse them, and consider a different approach. This requires brutal honesty on everybody’s part which is always more easily said than done.
Elections were supposed to be the critical part of just such a feedback system. Again, unfortunately, your folks just keep voting idiots into positions of influence. Or perhaps they’re aligned in the same direction as the bureaucrats… just as stupid, in which case they can be treated as one single entity.
Welcome to the tyranny of the (stupid)majority. If your education continues churning out idiots(which may be the Gramscians objective in the 1st place), then you are well and truly fighting an uphill battle.
Many politicians and admistrators are highly intelligent – it is not their stupidity that is the problem it is their ability to spend other people’s money (either by taxing or borrowing – government borrowing is not the same as private borrowing as the government people do not pay back the debt with their own money, nor is governmenht spending really investment)) and their power to order people about.
As for housing I would argue that government messed things up by its own taxes and regulations (although no mixture of commercial, charitable, and non state mutual activity is ever going to produce perfection – just some improvement over time). In Kettering the Council houses are both ugly (compared even to both the working class Victorian houses and the Alms houses) and defective – for example floor timbers are used as roof timbers.
Intelligence and wisdom are not the same thing. A person may have a very high I.Q. and many academic qualifications, yet be very unwise (indeed they may think that cleverness and their qualifications will enable them ti do good by spending other people’s money and ordering folk about).
One of the wisest councillors I have known was the very “housewife” type who is thought unfit to be a councillor in this brave new world. The sort once known as an “old women” (whatever their age) – the type of person who (in former times) doubted the wisdom of such things as the Census (1801 onwards) the Birth< Marriages and Deaths Regerstration Act (1836 - if memory serves) and the other building blocks of the modern state (Walter Baghot [spelling] was fond of recalling an "old women" who had doubt about such things, just as the young Winston C. claimed that only an old women could think that nationalization and eugenics would give the state too much power). Any way there is an "old women" in Kettering who may not have many qualifications and I have no idea what her I.Q. score would be - but understands that whatever the arguments of the clever people such things as a new town hall are not good ideas. If I had helped that lady in 1989 (or rather done more than help on the day of the election) she would have become leader of Northamptonshire Council (the lady lost by three votes and the Conservatives lost the council by one seat). If I had not been so clever ("safe seat", and all that) perhaps many things would have gone differently (although my lack of effort was partly because of the the destruction of the Federation of Conservative Students and partly because of work for my final examinations - although getting a First Class degree has proved as useless to me as my other qualifications have proved). Perhaps things might even have differently at the national level, for one of the arguments that the forces of evil used in their coup against Mrs Thatcher in 1990 was "we even lost Northamptonshire in the local elections". I rather doubt that I am a good man and Edmund Burke never wrote the exact words "for evil to triumph it is only nessercery for good men to do nothing " (although he came close and another Irishman whose name I can not remember used the exact words) - but my lack of effort did do harm at a local level (it mattered what party controlled councils then - it does not really now), and may have caused harm at national level (a small part of the opening of the door to creatures like Mr Major and Mr Cameron). Still, "game over" now. It is possible that if the U.K.I.P. came into office it would reverse the decline of this country into a statist dump (which is going to get a lot worse) - but I do not hold the comming into office of the U.K.I.P. to be at all likely. Certainly "Cameron's Conservatives" will not fight the powers that be, on the contrary they are part of the system. The B.B.C. (and so on) loves Mr Cameron and co, and Mr Cameron and co say (endlessly) how much they love the "modern" way of doing things. Blair, Cameron, Brown - different people, same thing.
Paul, I fear you may be right. Never thought I’d feel such despair, but with all parties competing to put up taxes, civil liberties being stripped away like the Vandals at Rome, technology fulfilling the securocrats’ wet dreams, and no sign at all of any opposition to the infantilisation of the people, maybe it’s time to start checking out the emigration options.
…no sign at all of any opposition to the infantilisation of the people…
I think that there is opposition. It’s just boiling in the backroom and hasn’t found expression yet. But when it does there will be alot of people ready to put the boot in.
Greetings from Leeds, UK. Excellent work, especially in regards to your critique on the PC language assault in the library! Masters of double think I tell you.
Kind regards,
G.