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So moves are afoot to lock the UK into the EU, sponsored by a man who is by any reasonable definition a traitor, by the name of Andrew Duff.
Pass whatever laws you wish, Andrew dear…as long as Britain maintains its own armed forces, ultimately British society can elect to rid itself of its onerous ties to socialist Europe, at bayonet point if required regardless of your meaningless legalisms… at which point it might be best for all concerned if you decided it would be prudent for you to stay in Brussels rather than come back to what you clearly do not regard as home.
Are you an anti-social thug? Do you enjoy terrorising your neighbours? Stealing from them? Generally making everybodys else’s life a hell? Do you sometimes long to live in a country where you can just destroy other people’s property and get away with it scot-free?
Well, then I suggest you come and live in Britain:
“Three men collared a teenage thug who hurled a brick through a window — only to end up charged with Kidnap”.
It gives me such a warm, fuzzy glow inside to know that I live in a country where the police won’t lift a finger to help you and you daren’t lift a finger to help yourself.
[For non-British readers the word ‘nick’ in the article headline is a British slang for ‘bust’]
Contrary to its popular cartoon image as a quaint, bucolic idyll, Britain is, and has been for some time, the most urbanised country in the world. The corollary of this is that British country folk are a minority without the political clout and voting power of the majority city-dwellers.
British governments are elected by those city-dwellers and that means that the country people are, shall we say, surplus to requirements. In most cases, this would be a blessing in disguise but, since emerging from 18 years of electoral wilderness, the re-invigorated Labour Party had dragons to slay.
The country folk are roundly loathed by most of the Labour Party who have always characterised them as ‘robber baron’ landowners, natural conservatives (in every sense of the word) and just too embarrassingly ‘British’ at a time when everyone was expected to have discarded such prehistoric notions.
Maybe Tony Blair shares those views, maybe not but what he has done is to serve up Britain’s rural communities as fresh red meat to quieten the marxist dogs in his own party. From the BSE fiasco, to the appalling incompetence and cruelty shown during the ‘Foot & Mouth’ outbreak (and which may yet prove to have been an act of sabotage), the banning of guns, the manipulation of planning laws so as to favour factory-farms (which have squeezed out the small, independent farmer) and now the proposed ban on hunting with dogs.
Five years of systematic bullying and persecution have so traduced Britain’s rural communities that some are simply no longer viable. They have paid a heavy price for being a detested minority. By degrees, their entire way of life is being abolished.
It is always difficult for a minority to fight back against a majority, especially when that majority has its hands of the levers of state power. But a promising way to begin is by (a) getting angry and (b) getting organised. Britain’s rural folk are now both and on September 22nd tens of thousands of them will take to the streets of the Capital to tell the government that they’re as mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore.
This is no block of rampaging rednecks. As with most things, the lefty metropolitan bigots are quite wrong about the rural people for they are as multifaceted and diverse as any others but they have actively choosen to unite under a slogan that proclaims ‘Liberty & Livelihood’ and that should tell you everything you need to know.
I canot read that slogan without being reminded of a famous song lyric: ‘Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose’. Well, if that’s true, then ‘nothing left to lose’ is also another word for ‘freedom’.
In yet another travesty of British justice, Barry-Lee Hastings has been convicted of manslaughter for defending not just his property but his family from a career serial burglar.
Naturally the state sees things differently.
Det Chief Insp Matthew Horne said the case sent a clear message that people in such circumstances should call the police “and let us do our job. If you take the law into your own hands there is always a danger”
Yet in the last year we have had story after story of the Police responding to pleas for assistance by turning up hours if not days later. The fact is, the job which Detective Chief Inspector Matthew Horne is speaking about is not your protection but rather the protection of the State’s monopoly on the means of violence.
Institutionally speaking, the safety of you, your family and your property is purely incidental: if it were otherwise, a person could legally own a weapon for their personal defence in Britain… yet regardless of the fact you may manifestly be at risk from violence in a high crime area or live in a home which has been robbed again and again and again, you may not even use a kitchen knife, let alone a gun, to protect yourself. Ask Barry-Lee Hastings.
The state is not your friend.
Dr. Jan Fortune-Wood is a libertarian home educator and freelance writer who supports ‘Taking Children Seriously’. She writes in with some insightful views on the Orwellian ‘Connexions’ programme.
The nine most frightening words in the English language, Ronald Reagan is once reputed to have said, are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” One only has to glance at the latest brainchild of ‘joined-up government’ to know the truth of that statement. The Connexions scheme is meant to ensure that children are tracked in order to give them maximum access to the benefits everything taxation has to offer. The price tag comes in the form of an electronic card that is programmed with a complete history of the child. It is optional, no one has to join the scheme – it’s simply that learning institutions can make it a requirement for registration and it remains to be seen how many other public sector institutions will be joining in the rush for data.
This back door identity card is administered by ‘personal advisors’ (PAs) using the ‘Connexions Assessment Tool’. Based on a system used by Social Services, the tool enables PAs to assess eighteen areas of private life and ‘score’ the answers from 1 – ‘positive strengths’ to 5 – ‘critical or complex issues identified’. With just one simple tool these PAs can sum up and objectify young people under the all encompassing headings of: Life Skills
Key Skills
Basic Skills
Achievements
Participation
Substance use issues
Emotional well-being
Physical health
Income
Housing
Social & community factors
Family history & functioning
Capacity of parents/carers
Risk of offending
Relationships within family & society
Attitudes & motivation
Identity & self-image
Aspirations
When it comes to ‘exploring issues’ with the young person no category escapes scrutiny, for example ‘attitude to authority’ is ‘explored’ as a key skill for young people. As the sickening document develops, PAs are advised to look for evidence of living in a criminal environment to predict risk of offending. Blair’s advisors have not yet discovered any gifted precogniscants who can see the future and lock up offenders before they commit their crime in the manner of the recent ‘Minority Report’ Movie, but they are doing their best to decide people’s futures even without the aid of extra sensory perception.
Young people are expected to report on their parents as part of this welfare provision, telling all about the level of their parents’ aspirations for the young person, what kind of dental care they have provided and how often they are made to take a shower. Parental stability, difficulties and ‘evidence’ of substance abuse by parents, all as perceived by the young person, are all recorded.
Again and again the recurrent word is ‘appropriate’ and the document suggests that it is highly appropriate for some under trained, intrusive PA to explore a young person’s private sexual history alongside her ‘developmental progress’ and immunisation history. Moreover, this PA, fresh from her in service training course on how to be an authoritarian government lackey goes on to delve into the young person’s mental health. ‘Do you now or have you ever had suicidal thoughts?’ Does the teenager have any other juicy emotional life experiences that can be recorded for his own good? Self harm? Bereavement? Masturbation doesn’t seem to be listed, but then there is enough of that going on in this document already.
Home-educated young people are amongst the few escaping the routine invasion of this new and invidious scheme, but as they enter colleges later in their education they are being asked for details of their Connexions cards and pressurized to join the herd of electronically tagged Blairite citizen fodder. Having libertarian views would no doubt earn them a 5 score for critical and complex attitudes to authority. Living in a household where they are taken seriously as autonomous human beings able to initiate and motivate their own learning would put them well off the scale, a new class of ‘potential offenders’ in their own right. The Connexions scheme is inimical to liberty and we need to be campaigning against it vociferously before all young people are made the subjects of joined up government ‘help’.
Dr. Jan Fortune-Wood, North Wales
I share Perry’s high opinion of Alice Bachini’s Libertarian Parent In The Countryside blog, provided only that she is able to keep it going, which it looks like she might.
Even if she doesn’t she’s already supplied many good blogules, of which my favourite so far is this, the best short explanation of the exact place of “spin” in British politics that I have yet come across:
… New Labour’s gift for spin was never what enamoured them to the British public, it’s more complicated than that; in fact, we just thought spin was what professional politicians did, and we wanted a not-totally-incompetent government to manage the economy for us, so we voted for the one that spun competently thinking maybe they were capable of adding up a few numbers as well. Or at least that they would actually be in their offices looking at a few numbers now and then instead of just hanging out in brothels wearing football shirts and hiding brown paper bags of money about their persons. Anyway, spin was the price for competence, we thought, which is why we’re still paying it.
The hangers out in brothels etc. are Britain’s Conservative Party, in case you live on the far side of the moon and didn’t recognise them. I’ve been saying something along these lines in conversation for years, but never got around to telling the universe.
The entire quoted paragraph above was in brackets in the original, a flying-off-at-a-tangent in a piece that was basically aimed at Tony Blair’s dress sense, body language, etc., provoked by a Telegraph photograph of the Great Leader.
There is a certain kind of right-wing pundit whose hatred for British Prime Minister Tony Blair is so great that, even when the man takes a stand worth supporting, such as Blair’s brave backing of Bush over the case for deposing Saddam, the rightwinger will always find some way of qualifying his support with a kind of low-tempo sneer. Sadly, Tory MP and Spectator magazine editor Boris Johnson just cannot quite bring himself to resist a barb or two in Tony Blair’s direction over this issue.
Of course, Johnson does have a valid point. If we are able and willing to oust Saddam who poses a threat to the West due to the alleged acquisition of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), then why not move to oust the brutal Zimbabwe dictator, Robert Mugabe, who has unleashed violence and mayhem against holders of British passports in that afflicted country? A fair point, but Mugabe is at least not yet attempting to get WMDs, at least as far as we know.
And on another point, Johnson omits to mention that Blair’s strong support for Bush, in contrast to that of German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, is another sign that Blair is backing the Anglosphere horse rather than the Euro-federal one. And for Boris Johnson, a so-called eurosceptic, that should be cause for celebration. Or maybe Johnson is not quite such a skeptic as he makes out.
Over on Airstrip One they’re getting themselves in something of a lather over the prospect of British involvement in any attack on Iraq. Hadrian Wise is forthright:
“There are many reasons for opposing British participation in an American attack on Iraq, but there is only one good one: that it is not in our interests.”
Really? I have what I consider to be jolly sound reasons for taking quite the opposite view.
Anyone who has not been in hibernation for the last 20 years must surely by now have noticed that Britain as a sovereign nation is being subjected to a remorseless process of extinction by degrees and I think it uncontroversial to suggest that, if Britain is subsumed into the Holy Belgian Empire, then any further discussion of British national interests will have been made entirely redundant by virtue of there no longer being a country called Britain. Are we agreed? Good. Let’s move on.
Given the above-mentioned scenario, one would have thought that the most screamingly urgent national interest would be to avoid it all costs and I suggest that a good way of avoiding it would be by steadfastly maintaining our strategic alliance with the USA whose own national interests are, as has been widely noted, growing increasingly inverse to the more nebulous concerns of the Europeans. This is an opportunity that British patriots could not, dare not miss.
As Our Glorious Leader maintains his pledge to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Americans, he alienates not only about two-thirds of his own political party but, far more importantly, drives an ever-deeper wedge between Britain and Brussels; a wedge that can only prove to be vital to our national survival. Does Blair have the political capital to throw us into the war against Iraq and get Britain into the Euro? I think not. The choice confronting us, therefore, is a) the extinction of Britain or b) the extinction of Saddam Hussein. Ooh, that’s a tough one!
Now before anybody embarks upon a lambast of my apparent callousness, I do realise that waging war on Saddam will, in all likelihood, lead to loss of both British troops and Iraqi civilians. I want to assure all that I am not indifferent to this but we’re talking about stark national interests here and, in that context, such sentimentalities do not get a look in. They never have and they never will.
So, as far as I am concerned, Tony Blair is doing the right thing and I cannot tell you how strange it feels to type those words. This is because I, along with many others, always believed that he saw his own destiny as future President of Europe. But I now suspect this may have changed. I think that the hand of history that Blair feels on his shoulder has shoved him rudely onto a different track; a track that I, as a patriotic Englishman, find most agreeable and one that I could scarcely have conceived of on September 10th 2001.
First, they came for the Haggis and I said nothing, because I did not eat Haggis
Then, they came for the Oysters, and I said nothing, because I did not eat Oysters
Then, they came for the Pheasant, and I said nothing, because I did not eat pheasant
Then, they came for the Venison, and I said nothing, because I did not eat Venison
And finally, they came for the Pate de Fois Gras, and there was nothing left worth eating!
David Harthill wants to know who, on the probable eve of a war with Iraq, is really ‘worth the money’. He has a thought on the firefighters’ pay demand…
…which, attempting to emulate the incomparable Scrofulous Steve, I thought might work better as an animated gif.
Current conditions:
A firefighter’s pay for an 18 year old starts at an annual £16,305, not including overtime at an hourly rate of £11.16. After 6 months this rises to annual £17,061 and £11.69 per hour respectively, and rises to a maximum of £21,648 / £14.82 after 15 years service without promotion.
[Source: FBU website]
By comparison, an infantry soldier’s pay starts at £12,578 and can rise
to a maximum of £15,290 without promotion. No overtime is available –
you work as hard and as long as you have to.
[Source: British Army website]
Has anyone visited the Fire Brigades Union website? They don’t mince words:
“…the Fire Brigades Union is part of the working-class movement, and, linking itself with the international trade union movement, has as its ultimate aim the bringing about of the Socialist system of society.”
David Harthill
…about The Daily Telegraph.
In an article called Bags of Sense apparently the ‘right wing’ Telegraph’ thinks it is okay for the state to tax us 10 pence per plastic carrier bag at supermarkets because:
Taxes are generally disagreeable. But this case is different. For one thing, the charge was not introduced as a surreptitious way of raising revenue. Nor has it had unintended consequences. Whereas the increase in tobacco taxes has led to smuggling, and rising fuel duties have encouraged hauliers to fill up across the Channel, the bag levy has altered consumer behaviour precisely as envisaged.
And so the Telegraph, which on one hand claims to be at the crusading vanguard of defending our civil liberties against the state with their ‘A Free Country’ campaign, is nevertheless happy with the concept that it is perfectly okay for the state to impose “changes to consumer behaviour” provided the objective is not really to raise revenue.
Sorry, but most taxes are not ‘disagreeable’, they are actually immoral theft backed by the threat of violence and this one is no different. I do not want the state having any say whatsoever in my private ‘consumer behaviour’. Of course one must keep in mind that The Daily Telegraph is a Tory newspaper, and thus actually has nothing against vast acts of statism per se, just so long as ‘The Right People’ are in control of them.
Bags of Sense? Bags of Bullshit actually.
I am referring to Harold Pinter, that well known playwright and signatory to the ‘Free Slobodan Milosevic’ campaign.
It seems he has avoided dying from cancer for a while, which I am sure will gladden the hearts of socialist mass murderers the length and breadth of Yugoslavia and Republica Serbska. I am sure his friends at the Tatler will be thrilled.
Vermin one and all.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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