Citizens and Neighbours

Supergrass: Breakfast in America

2009-08-09T19:18:00.003+01:00

Mark Steyn; praise him! Praise him! Praise his blessed name! points out that the White House , ie President Obama, is asking American Citizens to report anybody who says anything dodgy ( read 'critical') about the nationalisation of healthcare to the White House.

Get that? The head of government of a nuclear-armed nation wants freeborn American citizens to report on other freeborn American citizens for saying things about government policy that the self-same government doesn't believe to be true.

Now, I would never, under any circumstances, want to to interfere with the internal politics of a friendly, sovereign nation, and I don't mean to start now.
However, if they want untrue things reporting to the State, what harm could it do to give them TRUE information about, for example, actual socialized medicine here in Britain, plus other delightful aspects of the Welfare State which the Democrats so openly and flatteringly admire, who better to put them right than us Brits?.

Obviously, the American State might find it a bit more difficult or time-consuming to sort out and investigate freeborn American citizens who have been saying untrue things about socialized medicine's bright American future, but surely it's a small price to pay for putting them right?

The email address is: flag@whitehouse.gov

Thanks for all the Liberty Ships and Shermans and tyres and GIs and Polaris and NATO and Desert Storm and Sat Nav guys.

This one's for you.

The video they tried to ban

2009-06-22T00:18:00.002+01:00

Saucy, humourous criticism of the government in power which, for some reason, has been removed from You Tube.

Rude words and unpleasant pictures from the very start.

2009-06-16T17:29:00.003+01:00

Copied mercilessly from My Doubts:

Hacking the Iranian Government

There is little we can do to support the Persian uprising. Even official western support can backfire, as the propaganda uses it to suggest that the protests are instigated by the USA and Europe. However I understand that some protesters have asked, through the internet, for help in attacking government websites.

This website has been set up to make repeated requests to ten different Iranian government sites.

If enough people use it then those sites will crash. Government IT specialists helping to keep their sites running are not attacking the sources of information and communication for the protests. My best wishes to the Persian people. I hate to be racist, but all the Persians I have ever might have been lovely. It is so sad that their homeland is suffering so much from the insane theocracy. Good luck! Update: Oh, and check out this person's Twitter feed (you don't need to be a Twit to do it, I am not a member) for continuous information. This is Twitter's finest hour.

So here's something we can all do, right now, to strike the ayatollas.

More advice from Boingboing via Cassandra Troy

BoingBoing: "Cyberwar guide for Iran elections"

1. Do NOT publicise proxy IP's over twitter, and especially not using the #iranelection hashtag. Security forces are monitoring this hashtag, and the moment they identify a proxy IP they will block it in Iran. If you are creating new proxies for the Iranian bloggers, DM them to @stopAhmadi or @iran09 and they will distributed them discretely to bloggers in Iran.

2. Hashtags, the only two legitimate hashtags being used by bloggers in Iran are #iranelection and #gr88, other hashtag ideas run the risk of diluting the conversation.

3. Keep you bull$hit filter up! Security forces are now setting up twitter accounts to spread disinformation by posing as Iranian protesters. Please don't retweet impetuosly, try to confirm information with reliable sources before retweeting. The legitimate sources are not hard to find and follow.

4. Help cover the bloggers: change your twitter settings so that your location is TEHRAN and your time zone is GMT +3.30. Security forces are hunting for bloggers using location and timezone searches. If we all become 'Iranians' it becomes much harder to find them.

5. Don't blow their cover! If you discover a genuine source, please don't publicise their name or location on a website. These bloggers are in REAL danger. Spread the word discretely through your own networks but don't signpost them to the security forces. People are dying there, for real, please keep that in mind... (...) >>>

Green Revolution has more guidelines for the cyber revolutionary.

The ultimate in self-ownership, privacy and property

2009-05-05T09:07:00.009+01:00

Bear with me: this is the ultimate personal story of self-ownership violated, privacy denied and property stolen. It's about something moral that is fundamental to our civilization and our morality, that it needs to be read and absorbed and acted upon. I originally posted it elsewhere on my ranting site and you may have read it in its full horror and glory, but do at least follow the links to the book or the interview or the heroine's crusading site.

Hannah Shah is an antimatter suicide bomber.

She should get a pension from the Ministry of Defence. And M16. And Special Branch, and the anti-terrorist squad. And the British feminist movement. And every A & E Ward and Social Services department in Britain’s multicultural cities. Strangely enough, I don’t think that she does.

The MoD, MI5, A & E, et al, plus the feminists should seek to protect people from harm (in this case the harm from Islam) and especially the harm done to women for the latter bunch, and all of them are charged, one way or another, with picking up the pieces after violence. Supporting this brave and good woman would be an excellent way of inoculating our people and our country from one particular virus – the many violent aspects of Islam.

Her autobiography, The Imam’s Daughter, should be required reading for all military officers whose duties take them up against Islam as well as for our counter-spies and the other anti-terrorist apparatus of the British state. It should be advertised and reviewed, commented upon, quoted from and chewed over throughout the British feminists’ website The F Word.

I hope that you’ll buy the book and send her lots and lots of money and below I’ll tell you why.

‘You’re too savage in criticising Islam,’ said Mrs. Northwester. ‘You won’t win friends and influence people if you call Islam a death cult,’ she said. ‘You need to look at the small picture,’ she added, ‘and see what the people in it think and feel. Then you might be more persuasive.’’

I paraphrase (badly) her more elegant words. This was after I’d posted something especially virulent against some Islamist/dhimmi twonk over at A Tangled Web late one Sunday night. But it is the female of the species’ mission in life (and often their direst necessity, alas) to gentle the excesses of the male, and so I listened and thought about it, read the review by Granny Weatherwax in The New English Review and bought the book: all Victor Kayam-style Right-wingly.

Maybe by reading something other than Irshad Manjis’s similar-but-different The Trouble With Islam Today and Robert Spencer’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and Islam Unveiled, its predecessor and source-work, and perhaps by reading another personal view - and a British one at that - I might get a bit more perspective on the topic. She got her wish.

Be careful what you wish for, incidentally.

If you do buy the book, and I hope that you will because this young woman has a mission and we can all be a part of it, I suggest for your own peace of mind that you try to think of it not merely as the diary of a young girl, but rather as a home-grown version of the Great Escape. I choose my words carefully here. She lived her early life in the shadow (and the threat of death, reading between the lines and from what her father said) of a life-denying totalitarian ideology that plans to subdue the world, and it is now her mission, despite being on the run, to frustrate that ideology and to bring freedom to Muslims throughout Britain and the world: particularly the women and girls.

Hannah Shah’s huge capacity to love her fellow human beings in general, and her utterly undeserving family in particular, is almost beyond belief. She is still on the run from her vengeful family, whose ‘dishonour’ is still so important to her that she refuses to take the details of the decade-long campaign of incestuous rape by her imam father to the police. Doing so would hurt the mother, brothers and sisters who ignored and left unpunished the multiple sexual assaults that her father inflicted on her throughout what in a parallel universe would be called her ‘childhood.’ So she hasn’t done it.

She was born free: a British subject in a Northern English town and a descendent of Pakistani Muslims and she lived her whole childhood in chains of her family’s making until she finally broke away.

And what chains. Many of the neighbours in her all-but completely Pakistani Muslim terraced street stayed so close to home that they never left it. This was especially true of her father who, once he decided that as an imam he was above working for a living, went on sickness benefits and housing benefits for the rest of his life.

One of the many wonderful things about Hannah Shah’s story is that despite it all she is, delightfully and definitely, English to the core. Her outrage at her father’s fraudulent welfare claim; at his laziness and dishonesty and his contempt for the supporting country and culture off which he sponged and financed his worthless life could come straight from the pages of the Daily Mail, or from the disgusted conversation of my colleagues at the Department for Hurt and Awful Nuisances. Or from BNP campaign literature, come to that.

Many of the womenfolk were forced to stay at home, though many also worked. Her own mother was nearly as much of a prisoner as she was – and was beaten savagely in front of Hannah on many occasions for imaginary or exaggerated imperfections in her cooking or housework. Imam Shah loved to inflict pain and to bully anyone around him who he could. Hannah Shah is always keen to give ‘moderate Islam’ the benefit of the doubt, and points out that, despite her never having been bought a single toy in her life, despite her never receiving a single word of praise or affection from her father, other fathers and especially one did play with their daughters and show them affection and give them treats. Her father was especially cruel, and so her argument goes that there is room in the Pakistani Muslim community - even there - for some forms of love. She also points out that class makes its presence felt – her family and friends were from impoverished farming stock, but other Muslims in the town are city-bred, lovers of education and ambitious, in some ways, even for their daughters. So it’s not Islam’s fault, right?

Up to a point. Because when she finally breaks away and changes her religion and is living in one of a series of safe houses (in England! Safe houses for British subjects to escape the violent ambitions of Islam!) that she has to occupy to evade a vengeful family, then the armed mob of Muslim men who find her, and from whom she barely escapes with her life, then her favourite moderate Muslim neighbour the doting father is right there with the mob supporting the frenzied Imam Shah who has come to claim his property and bring her home, to a certain beating, rape, and possibly murder. This is honour killing under the Spar shop sign; the Koran to be enforced in its brutal bloody fullness where Walkers Crisps and Mars Bars are for sale along with Coke and Tizer and The Sun and The Mirror. This is England.

When not beating and sexually assaulting his elder daughter and calling her worthless, evil and a temptress, and throwing her to the filthy floor of their coal cellar, her father is a virtual prisoner himself; rarely leaving the street except for his frequent trips to the mosque where he ruled as an absolute monarch. The women were separated from the men in more ways that the Koran prescribes - excluded, ignored, and even kept apart from the men during weddings. Hannah stresses the intellectual sterility of Islam in her background, and its lack of anything like humanity. All passages are read in Arabic, which nobody understands, and learned by rote and repeated by human recording machines. Her father refuses to have Jesus’ name mentioned in the house, and speaks spitefully of him, though the elder Hannah, the theology graduate, points out that Jesus is named more often in the Koran than Mohammed was.

One of her brothers – hitherto and thereafter treated as a lord of creation for not being a girl and therefore not endlessly called ‘worthless’ – was sent off to Pakistan against his will to learn to memorize the Koran at a madrassah. He returned years later, a beaten and broken young man; prone to mental illness and with much of his childhood affection burned out of him. So much so that he goes along with the family’s persecution of the apostate Hannah. They all do, one way or another.

Forced marriage to cousins, here or back in the old country, is part and parcel of the brutal life of the autocratic Imam Shah and many of his rural peasant neighbours. Hatred of white people is ever-present – ‘gora’ and ‘gori’ are spoken as contemptuously as any skinhead cretin’s ‘Paki’ by her father whenever Hannah’s would-be friends tried to visit, or about the white TEFL teacher who secretly taught English to an earlier, gentler, non child rape-excusing mother.

Anything and everything Western or English is haram -‘forbidden’ - in Imam Shah’s lawless world of unspoken but often broken and always savagely enforced rules. Everything; except from the benefits he receives for pretending to be sick and for having many children. Everything Western is rejected, apart from the technology – cars and television and the air liners which take them home for holidays in Pakistan to be feted as millionaires – and anything else the imam and his male relatives and neighbours want to use and enjoy. The proud elder brothers’ cars are used once to take Hannah out for a ride beyond the street/ghetto/prison of her birth, and never to help the ageing mother carry heavy groceries home form the despised gora supermarkets.

Men and boys are everything, women and girls worthless – to be expensively dowered off and good riddance. Women and girls are seductresses, who inflame men to sexual lust and who tempt them away from worshipping Allah – this is what the rapist imam uses to excuse his frequent violations of his won daughter.

Is it Islamic to do so? And if so is it Koranic, and therefore supposedly immutable as the pure and complete word of God, or merely from the Hadiths, which some Muslims argue are heretical and blasphemous?

If the imam says it’s Islamic - and his authority is unquestioned in these communities - then it is indeed Islamic. And that’s all that the friends and relatives of poor little Hannah Shah cared about when they helped track her down to meet her family’s ‘justice.’

And what of the outside world; of school, and friends and the white people: the goray whom her father loathed and despised once again as soon as he’d cashed his Gyro?

Hannah loved them. She loved her school and the knowledge that it sought to impart; heterodox and varied and questionable. She loved her generous friends and the gentle white adults who never beat her or raped her or left her bound and starving in a coal cellar, and who showed her affection, and who saw her as worth talking to, and who were never allowed to visit her and whom she was never allowed to visit. She loved the soap operas and the teenage heart-throbs and the western fashions and the dolls’ houses that her friends owned though she had nothing to show to her friends in return because she owned no toys. She loved the teachers who sought to bring out her writing and story-telling, and who in her teen years tentatively tried to draw her out about her silences and bruises and her many unexplained absences from school…

Hannah loved them even though they failed her.

They didn’t pursue her noteless absences from school as they would have had with white children. Miss Shah is unequivocal in her contempt for the politically correct white society that respects her community’s ‘traditions’ – which means that when girls disappear forever their absenteeism is never followed up to discover they have been sent to rural squalor and even more intense drudgery in Pakistan.

(This has been going on for decades. My mother was a teacher in what was quaintly called a ‘special school’ back in the 1970s and she once described to my horror that a thirteen-year-old girl; bright and funny and learning English at an exponential rate and soon to have a place at the ‘normal’ school and who had once made her beloved schoolteacher and classmates some chapatis (the first I had ever seen) had been sent home to her family’s village to be married. I knew even then as a kid that you had to be sixteen at least to marry. I don’t know what if anything Mum did to chase the ‘truant’ Rani up, but Mum was a giver and a striver in her day. Maybe she had a go but didn’t trouble her young son with the details. Her headmaster was a clock-watcher and a pension-chaser so I doubt that Mum had much official back-up if she did go to Social Services about the poor lass. I wonder whether the political will existed in the 1970’s to confront Muslim or Pakistani child abuse – it’s surely in short supply now, and this book should help to drum up some more backbone – if we can get it publicized. Sometimes I think that Edward Heath’s sacking of Enoch Powell wasn’t entirely a good thing for life in Britain. But only when there’s a ‘y’ in the day. So there you have it; a Northwester family skeleton. I hope you’ll help this book to make some difference to a new generation of Ranis.)

When the school finally brings in Social Services because a Christian teacher follows Hannah’s problems up, then they send her…a Pakistani Muslim social worker who immediately betrays her to her father and gets her a massive and especially foul beating and more rape. It appears that the social worker worm Omar thinks that betraying the ‘community’ to outsiders is worse than raping and beating a little girl year after year.

I’m being judgemental here, I know, but what is judgement for but to tell the difference between cute folk customs like the giving of Eid sweets and morris-dancing on the one hand and child slavery and badger-baiting on the other?

Hannah’s eventual (last-minute, nearly deadly and precarious) escape is as exciting an adventure story as any I’ve read in fiction given the natural physical and the falsely-induced emotional weaknesses that the Pakistani women in Hanna’s neighbourhood are prone to, and in a sense it’s still going on as her family and community have never given up hunting her.

Her triumph is one of love – specifically Christian love as many of her supporters and protectors are Christians – but also of the love that is available when people are allowed to associate with other, different people from other religions or none, in our imperfect, Western, capitalist society.

There is so much material wealth too outside the hate-filled and ignorant world of Hannah’s home that her friends do have available, for example; cars and spare bedrooms in large houses for escape and refuge; and spare cash to clothe and feed Hannah as a free woman. There is a State education system that is still richly funded enough to give her a second and then a third chance at a degree and qualifications and an escape to work in the south of England where she finds more friendship and still more love.

The second part – the post-escape part is as interesting and is way less harrowing then the sex-slave beginning. her triumph, loves’ triumph, and in many ways Britain’s triumph at least reminds us of what is so good and beautiful and worth defending at any cost in our free society, and I recommend that conservatives, liberals, libertarians, nationalists and socialists alike should all read this book before next talking about multicultural society or Islam. All observant Muslims should read it, also, and do some comparisons.

Miss Shah has done her country and our civilization a great patriotic and charitable service in writing this harrowing and enlightening – and often inspiring and also amusing – work of social history.

She specifically and clearly criticises the politically correct white population that will not confront sex slavery and child rape, and particularly the BBC journalist who asks her ‘So what do you hope to achieve by speaking out? Surely, you’ll just cause more trouble?’

Hannah Shah doesn’t believe that the liberal establishment’s policy of silence or ignoring these atrocities will let it all go away. She celebrates and appreciates religious and political choice and freedom of speech in our democracy. She does distinguish her father’s type of Islam from supposedly gentler varieties, and I have to say she doesn’t provide much in the way of examples, though we can infer that, just as only small a minority of our Muslim neighbours are involved in Jihadist activities and maybe a larger one in jihadist belief, then perhaps also only a minority of girls are being raped, beaten and surely only a few are murdered by their families.

So how is she an antimatter suicide bomber?

She describes the obscurantist, ignorant, brutal, male-dominated and xenophobic culture from which our home-grown 7/7 suicide-bombers sprang. All were brought up and educated in the north of England, and 3 out of 4 were born here. They attended mosques like Hannah’s father’s and travelled to be further radicalized in Pakistan, and learned as Hannah’s brothers did all about the worthlessness and corruption of Western society (to the point that their ‘community’ holds it wrong to phone the police when a white neighbour is being assaulted) in the febrile atmosphere of Sub-continental Islam.

There is little gentleness there, and what there is dissolves at the first hint of the imam’s disapproval. There is racial and religious hatred of foreigners – imam Shah has a hierarchy of the races from the Arabs down through Pakistani Muslims to other Muslims down to whites and finally down to Jews. I forget exactly where he placed black people, but you get the point. Women and girls are worthless – expensive to provide with dowry – and sexual temptresses who must be masked and beaten and kept I their place.

Is it any surprise that such a mind-set, such a culture isn’t overflowing with raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens?

At the very least, Miss Shah is needed by Britain to expose this foul undercurrent in our ‘diverse’ society.

And she can help soften it; reform it and offer refuge and advice to women and girls on the run from unreformed Islam’s foulest superstitions and nastiest practises, and one great thing that our homeland needs is free, outspoken, inoculated Muslim women to expose and shame the violent, self-centred, secretive corruption that much – though not all – of Islam encourages and allows to occur.

Free, confident, jihad-free Muslim women or ex-Muslim women who can live their lives for themselves according to their own wishes and standards are needed; as examples; as beacons of what freedom and love rather than hatred can achieve in this country.

It’s got to tempt at least some of the Muslim boys and men away from Islamist brutality on the internet and the bone-dry, savage world of the kaffir-hating mosque, because breeding - all other things being equal – will out.

In that, at least, imam Shah was right.

NNW.

Hannah Shah resources and grumps.

Here’s the book.

Here is Hannah Shah’s website that offers help and advice for Muslim women and girls escaping slavery, rape, and other abuse.

Here’s her interview in The Times.

It’s official.

The Ministry of Defence, M15, Special Branch, the anti-terrorist squad and the British feminist movement are all bollocks.

Hannah Shah should get a pension from the Ministry of Defence. And M16. And Special Branch, and the anti-terrorist squad. And the British feminist movement. And every A & E Ward and Social Services department in Britain’s multicultural cities. I don’t think that she does.

Oddly enough, a site-search for this incestuously raped, countlessly beaten, from-the-cradle enslaved and would-be force-married little girl on the F Word draws a blank. Perhaps it’s a lousy search facility on the site? They do lead today with an approving account of stink-bombing a beauty pageant, so they are - as it were - somewhat on the ball against the Bikini Threat to London’s long-suffering student womanhood. Yey. Go British feminists.

Oh, and if you search our national broadcaster; the one that produces Woman’s Hour and supports and celebrates ‘diversity’ and ‘women’s’ rights’ in all things – guess what you get if you search its website for either her name, or her book?

Did you guess correctly? I suppose there’s not room on the site or in the archives for this little tale, what with all the football and the plight of the Palestinians, right?

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Damned if they do.

2009-05-02T14:34:00.003+01:00

With the recent conviction of Baby P's joint murderer and step-father Steven Barker being convicted for the rape of a two-year-old girl, Social Workers and the Social Services are in the news spotlight again.

I'm not a huge fan of Social Workers and the Social Services, though I'm aware that they have huge responsibilities to fulfil.

And yet, even though you can argue they miss some of the most extreme cases of, for example, child abuse, there are those who say that social workers are too zealous, rather than too cautious, in dealing with matters such as adoption and access to children.

Here are three sites which seek to confront the other dark side of social work - where the see or punish abuse that isn't there - or that just isn't abuse at all.

The Families and Social Services Information Team.
"Fassit was founded in 2005. A non-governmental voluntary organisation independent of Local Authority Social Services Departments. Fassit provides a website containing information and advice for families with children experiencing frustration in working with Social Services in Child protection Proceedings."
It campaigns to keep children at home with their families whenever possible despite what they see as the false disapproval or victimization of the Social Services. Read it here.

No 2 abuse covers genuine cases of abuse, but also campaigns against that zealotry in the State's child welfare bureaucracy, including forced adoption.
Read it here.

FORCED ADOPTION concentrates wholly on the one aspect of Social Services excesses and the secrecy of the family courts that sometimes nurture them.
A personal crusade by a lone campaigner, it brings together the political, legislative, ideological and human mess that our government seem to be failing to mend. Read it here.

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Nuke from Orbit

2009-04-30T20:52:00.005+01:00

Casualties

Here, Angus Dei tell the horrifying story of the death of Mrs Angus - at the hands of our beloved National Health Service: The Envy Of The World And What All Good Americans Deserve. He urges us to join this Bloggers Unite page dedicated to exposing "all the horror stories of relatives and partners suffering injustice at the hands of the NHS, the Healthcare Commission and the GMC."

I suppose that that must include me, then.

Going back to the mid-1970s when my father visited a GP to complain about stomach pains. He prescribed indigestion tablets for Dad: a man with a history of high blood pressure and shortness of breath and possessing the distinctive club fingers of those prone to heart disease. The doctor never took his pulse or checked Dad's blood pressure. And away came Dad, and off we went to the chemist's for the useless pills. He was having his first heart attack there and then in the clinic.
He lived through a year's convalescence until he went out for a heathy stoll and never came back.

Oddly enough, that self-same surgery prescribed tranquillizers for the insomniac and grieving new widow, and so mum was given Temazepam, which is "for the short-term treatment of sleeplessness in patients who have difficulty maintaining sleep...
Temazepam is officially indicated for severe insomnia and other severe or disabling sleep disorders. The prescribing guidelines limit prescribing of hypnotics to two-four weeks due to concerns of tolerance and physical dependence."

The NHS was so thoughtful and caring that the original diagnosis was never reviewed and for 10 years this habit-forming drug was repeat-prescriptioned on the nod by a succession of incurious State-employed physicians with no interest in changing her treatment or even in questioning the growing illness and depression in an increasingly sickly and sleepless woman. In the end, someone noticed that it was doing her no good, but by the time she had signed herself into a mental hospital and been taken off Temazepam she was so sick and dispirited and messed-up by the drug and still a grieving widow that she decided that the bottom of the local river would be the quickest and best route to sleep, peace, and maybe to my father.

So do visit Justice for bereaved patients partners and relatives and read what it has to say - and use it, if you wish, to use Angus's angry grieving page send the Health Secretary your heartfelt wishes...

The NHS got both my parents. Nuke from orbit.

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Independence Day

2009-04-28T18:10:00.005+01:00

Via Trixy we learn that Independence Home here was launched today by two UK Independence Party members to discuss not just UKIP's hopes for Britain's freedom from the European Union, but also to publicize and discuss the party's other policies.
True to form it's already got substantial, meaty political reportage and commentary: hard-hitting and full of facts - unlike the copy-and-paste press handouts that typify so much of the mainsteam (and usually pro-EU) media. Very well worth a visit, even without considering the dismal alternatives.

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The Big Ask

2009-04-25T08:59:00.002+01:00

Here it is in all its glorious simplicity.

A heartfelt, polite and non-partisan request that the Prime Minister, the Right Honourable Gordon Brown MP, should offer his resignation to her Majesty The Queen forthwith: delivered right to his door.

Now, who'd want to sign such a petition?

Happy Saint George's Day

2009-04-23T21:19:00.006+01:00

... for England must be worth a lot, because it costs a lot. Its government told us so yesterday in the Budget.
And did any of you get a bud yesterday? One single bud? Anyone? Me, neither.

This is my sheepish return to duty at Citizens and Neighbours.
Apologies to anyone out there who had had higher hopes of this that I've eared recently.
Blogwise I've been selfish - letting off too much steam at the ranting site and so nothing's got done here at CAN. Let me start to fix it, a bit.

So what's new?

Sue recommends that we go for this Big Brother and Freedom of Speech petition:

"We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to stop the proposed legislation requiring Facebook to monitor users' contacts."

Raedwald wants us to stick our necks out and our noses into this consultation:
This consultation covers proposals to amend...the Accounts and Audit Regulations 2003 to extend the requirement on public bodies when producing their statement of accounts to include additional information about the remuneration of senior officer. It seeks views on:
A proposed level of disclosure for senior officers in terms of salary, bonuses, additional payments, benefits in kind, compensation/ex-gratia payments, and pension entitlements.
A definition of 'senior'.
A proposed change to the way staff earning over £50,000 is reported, breaking this down into £5,000 bandings in place of the existing £10,000 banding.
Get those fat cats of the trough, or something - and we've got to 22 June 2009 to create a stink.

And The UK Libertarian Party wants us to send the shirt off our backs to Ten Downing Street with a commentary on the latest Budget. And here's the Facebook page, courtesy of Old Holborn.

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The Triumph of the Political Class

2009-02-28T17:37:00.004Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#Why?Political party membership has tumbled since 1945 for 20% of the population to a few hundred thousand now. Political parties need media resources to persuade would-be voters as the mass doorstep canvass has become a thing of the past. This requires money and control over the media.

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

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

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

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

#How?

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

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

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

>Muscling in on the judiciary.

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

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

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

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

Results.

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

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

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

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

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

Home.

How to find stuff in Citizens and Neighbours.