Samizdata

Mr Christopher Booker, of the Sunday Telegraph newspaper, has been writing articles for the last year or so showing that there is no freedom of speech for local councillors in Britain.

Under the regulations introduced by the Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott a local councillor can be tossed out of the council and disqualified from being a councillor for years (in defiance of the voters) for such crimes as being “rude and demeaning to a senior officer”, “bringing the council into disrepute” (by attacking it – not by being involved in corrupt activities), trying to “reopen closed issues” (closed by the powers-that-be of course) and being “generally malicious”.

This is all on top of the Prescott principle that a councillor should not be allowed to speak about an issue he has an ‘interest’ in. This is not a matter of saying “I have a financial interest in such and such a judgement being made by the council…” A person may not be allowed to speak even if he clearly states what his financial interest is – or even if he has no financial interest at all. This is because an interest has been defined as including previous campaigns against a project or policy of the council.

Oddly enough only councilors who are against local government judgements that are in line with national government policy tend to get hit by these regulations. If one has campaigned against a government project one can be barred from speaking against it as a councillor, but if one has supported the project (or even been involved in drawing it up – for example in one of the government’s ‘Regional’ structures) one is rather less likely to be barred from speaking. The cases are decided by the ‘Standards Board for England’ – no judgement by a jury of one’s peers of course. Any councillor who tries to expose how local government officers and national government directives make ‘local democracy’ a farce can simply be removed from the council and barred for standing for election for X number of years.

The Prescott regulations are clearly not something that John Prescott happened to think of – they are an experiment that will later be more widely applied (already our old friends in the European Union are thinking about how to exclude from elections people who do not accept their ‘values and principles’).

When I have touched on all this in the past, some people have said “take the rascals to court!” → Continue reading: No freedom of speech for local councillors in Britain

I knew Sir Alfred Sherman only slightly (we met a few times), and in my youth I was too silly to value him as I should have done. I remember Sir Alfred once warned me (and others) of the plot by the establishment (by the way, as Sir Alfred was fond of pointing out, ‘the establishment’ is not the aristocracy or gentry, although some members of the establishment, such as Sir Max Hastings, may pretend to be gentry) to destroy the Federation of Conservative Students (FCS), I dismissed what he said as paranoia. I had yet to learn that the establishment were prepared to tell any lie and use any tactic, both in their unholy war against liberty generally and in their specific struggle to destroy the independence of the United Kingdom and make this country a province of the European Union.

Sir Alfred was of course correct in thinking that the destruction of FCS was an experiment by the left to see if they could destroy the democratically elected Mrs Thatcher later on (if an elected body could be destroyed, why not an elected Prime Minister). Without the FCS Mrs Thatcher could be presented as ‘extremist’ (as we were much more libertarian than the lady was, Mrs Thatcher could not be successfully presented as ‘extremist’ whilst FCS still existed, that tag would be monopolised by us silly students).

Also the lady would lose her most visible young supporters and could be later presented as isolated within the Conservative party (although a majority of both party members and members of Parliament supported Mrs Thatcher that little problem could be got round by manipulating the party rules). The antics of students (real or invented) would never cost the Conservative party votes, but without the students Mrs Thatcher herself could be presented as the wild and wacky person.

It would still take years to destroy Mrs Thatcher (as part of a general campaign to eliminate resistance to statism in Britain) – but the ground work would have been laid.

So the party Chairman (the normally tough and intelligent Norman Tebbit) was manipulated (via a campaign of great skill and dishonesty) into abolishing the FCS and the ‘libertarian’ Chairman of FCS itself was bought off with various promises (he is now a Conservative party MP and about as libertarian as the rest of Mr Cameron’s other little statist friends). Sir Alfred predicted all of this well in advance and told us – and (moron that I was) I did not believe him.

However, I was sad to learn of the death of Sir Alfred and read his obituary in the Daily Telegraph newspaper (supposedly the main Conservative newspaper in the United Kingdom) with interest.

I will not go into the various distortions and half truths with which the writer of the obituary seeks to smear Sir Alfred (the establishment has no honour and will even spit upon the dead), but I will comment upon one part of the obituary where the writer tries to praise Sir Alfred. → Continue reading: Sir Alfred Sherman – an ignorant obituary from the Daily Telegraph