UK’s rulers ‘out of touch’ with common folk

Millionaires’ reign: UK’s rulers ‘out of touch’ with common folk

 

Britain’s new political elite is an 

assortment of multi-millionaires 

who studied at 

exclusive universities. 

But down on the streets 

there is a growing sentiment 

that those running

 the country 

are detached from 

those they lead.

The latest example of how a few careless words by a millionaire
in power triggers anger from the people affected by his governmental
decisions comes from Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith.
On Monday, he claimed in a live radio talk show that if he
had to he could live on 53 pounds (US$80) a week.

That’s the sum that one of the callers said is left to
survive on after the government’s latest housing
 welfare cuts. Starting this week, some 2.4 million
households are facing a rise in taxes, averaging 138 pounds ($210) per year.

Hours later an astonishing 97,000 people signed an
 online petition on the change.org website calling on
 Duncan Smith to prove his words. The text challenged
 him to “live on this budget for at least one year”instead
of spending his salary, which is almost 50 times higher.

At a time when the UK is facing painful public cuts,
 many feel the authorities are detached from those
 suffering from the measures being taken, reports RT’s
 Sara Firth from London.

“They’ve got no idea what it’s like, they’re making all these attacks 
and they’ve never been unemployed people living on 56 pounds a week,”
  Helen, a protesting public worker, told RT. “
They’ve no idea what it’s like to be a hard-working person 
wanting to do well when you’re having your pay cut, yours hours attacked. 
They get tax cuts we get tax increases. It’s disgraceful.”

While the ordinary citizens have to cope with less benefits and higher costs,
Britain’s 13,000 top earners are receiving a 100,000-pound tax cut, the Labour Party claims.

While Labour might be accused of scoring political points by waging class warfare,
they don’t escape harsher criticism. Ed Miliband
and his wealthy counterparts have been dubbed ‘champagne socialists’ by critics.

With Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne
having just delivered his budget for 2013 amid a
coalition-tailored climate of austerity, the question stands:
can the political elite really understand what the cuts mean for ordinary voters?

Conservatives are not looking far to explain
how it’s not their fault that the situation is gloomy.

"You can always come up with things that have gone wrong.
 With the bad economic situation that we inherited it was
 almost inevitable that we were going to lose our AAA rating,"
Conservative MP Geoffrey Clifton-Brown told RT.

UK unemployment is up, growth is down and ordinary British people feel unrepresented.
And the resurgence of the toffs to some is an indicator of a much greater malaise.

“There is a problem with the political class in general. 
It is actually out of touch with the general population. T
hey don’t really understand how a lot of families are suffering
now with rising basic costs. And of course it’s very much this top-down elites’ policies
that is driving these costs up,” Richard Wellings from the Institute of Economic Affairs told RT.

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Advice for Conservatives

Simple advice for Conservatives

Mar 2013

by Brett Stevens.

On both sides of the Atlantic ocean conservatives are in disarray. Soul-searching and rending of cloaks follows lost elections or foregone opportunities. Everyone seems to know what to do, except that means that no one knows what to do because there are too many options.

Relying on articles written in the mainstream press and their own internal debates, conservatives are generating massive storms of confused statements. In doing so, they are acting out the dreams of their enemies, because the confusion and fear are palpable, and are alienating voters at a rapid pace.
Complexity has arisen where none needs to be. Instead of relying on this completely dysfunctional process, conservatives should consider going back to the type of simple advice that has guided us in the past. Ours is a viewpoint of gut instinct and holistic knowledge, and it’s not going to fit in any other template.
1. Identify what you stand for.
An alarming number of conservatives have no idea what conservatism is. They can recite positions on certain issues, or quote public authorities, but they have no idea what the philosophy is as a whole. Liberals have a clear ideology, libertarians have a single rule, but what do conservatives have? Billions of hours of video, reams of paper, tons of commentary, and the end result is chaos.
What is conservatism? By the nature of its name, it is to conserve: this means to save what is good, pitch out what is bad, and ignore the rest. Logically, this extends to a few other ideas. First, we’re about results and consequences in reality; this is not ends over means, per se, but paying more attention to ends/goals as contrasted to results. Second, this requires a study of the past to know which ends we’ll achieve with our actions. Finally, this implicates a goal that is ongoing and timeless; in our case, it’s a quest to produce the best society possible by following “the good, the beautiful and the true.”
2. Do not be reactionary.
A non-reactionary conservative is baffling to liberals. They do not like whole truths. Their movement is social, which means it is based in individuals regulating their self-esteem through participation. This means that they do not attempt risky things like creation of new ideas, but instead focus on details of the current system that they do not like. When they spot an offensive detail, they rally the troops for a Two Minutes Hate, and then attack obsessively.
By no means should conservatives ever stoop to the liberal level and talk about details, or things we dislike. Among other things, you will never beat liberals at complaining: they are the masters, and they are a billion times better than you will ever be. Focus on the big picture instead, and where we want to be eventually.
3. Do not adopt the values of your opposition.
Right now, the right is a giant stack of people all shouting at each other. Things are wrong! Somebody fix it! Since most of them are accustomed to business, they offer a business-y solution: figure out what the other guy is doing, and imitate it.
However, in business as in politics, this is a bad idea if you’re behind. The other guy has the upper hand in that area, and by imitating him, you offer an inferior substitute, not a different option. This drives away people who want an honest option while simultaneously failing to attract people to you who will get a better deal with the other guy.
In the case of Republicans, trying to be more leftist is a strategy destined to fail spectacularly, which is why liberals consistently urge us to adopt it. They tell us that if we be more like them, we’ll get the votes; in fact, we’ll lose our audience and fail to gain theirs, and basically die out at that point.
We should have learned this with John McCain. Throughout his campaign, he waited nervously by the podium chewing his nails. When a liberal suggested a plan, he leaped into action, proclaiming his own plan which was basically the same except it had some advantage in the details. Everyone nodded and ignored him, because he made himself irrelevant.
Romney/Ryan were doing their best in the polls when they had strong conservative opinions that stood out from others, and when they emphasized common sense whole solutions like fixes to the economy and society. They lost as soon as they got cowed by media coverage of the 47% remark, and started trying to imitate leftist positions.
We cannot be bigger gift-givers or immigration-panderers than the Democrats. They offer everything we offer, and more, because Democrats are the party of pluralism, or of not having social standards at all. Democrats are the party of the ego, of the individual, of the lack of order. They offer people virtually no rules and free bennies.
We can’t beat that without becoming non-conservatives, at which point everyone will flock to the Democratic party anyway. Do not try to play this game as it will fail.
Simple ideas, deep effect
A simple detail is an annoyance; a simple highly abstract statement can summarize a belief. For example, Marxists have the idea of class revolt through dialectics; anarchists have the idea of no leaders. We need to stick to similar simple ideas as conservatives, and stop the panic and chicken little activity so that we can focus on what makes us popular with other conservatives, and use that consensus to win.

France Laid Waste | American Renaissance

France Laid Waste | American Renaissance

France Laid Waste

Rémi Tremblay, American Renaissance, March 15, 2013

Immigration and crime in la belle France.

Laurent Obertone, La France Orange Mécanique, Ring, 2013, 350 pp., €18 (in French only)

La France Orange Mécanique (Clockwork Orange France) became an instant best seller in France, finding itself in the top-ten list on Amazon.fr despite no advertising and a virtually unknown author. Even in a climate of reduced book sales, the publisher, Ring, has recently had an additional 18,000 copies printed. Some reviewers note that if this book—which describes the true face of crime in France—had been published before last year’s presidential elections, it might have had an impact on the outcome, swaying votes towards the Right.

The book, whose title refers to the 1962 Anthony Burgess novel about “ultra-violence,” begins with an all-too-common event: a white woman is savagely beaten and raped almost to death by a foreigner. This gruesome rape is presented from the victim’s perspective, allowing the reader to grasp the horror of the situation—a horror that can be washed away in a sea of statistics: 7 percent of French women are raped at some point in their lives, and there are 13,000 thefts, 2,000 assaults and 200 rapes every day in France. Behind these statistics, there are personal dramas and shattered lives. For each crime, there is a life that will never be the same. This is what Laurent Obertone wants us to remember: Crime is not a matter of numbers; it is devastating trauma.
Beyond the crime statistics, many lives are ruined by daily harassment from immigrants, but victims get no support from society and resign themselves to their fate. They suffer from depression, fear, and even suicide, but they never appear in official reports: They will be forgotten and ignored.
In pointing out how heavily concentrated crime is among immigrants, Mr. Obertone breaks a major taboo. He is frank about the vast overrepresentation of Gypsies and North Africans in French prisons. In France, there are no official statistics about ethnicity and crime, but there are figures for the number of foreigners in the prison system (22 percent). These statistics are skewed because an Arab born in France is considered a Frenchman. Ironically, Mr. Obertone has to cite a study reported in the Washington Post to conclude that between 60 and 70 percent of the prison population is Muslim.
Mr. Obertone has also found local racial statistics on crime for some towns and cities, which confirm the overrepresentation of non-whites in prison. He shows that this not a uniquely French phenomenon; in European countries blacks and Arabs are always overrepresented in the criminal population. He makes an air-tight case for what everyone knows but dares not say: The explosion of crime is directly linked to immigration.

“Ultra-violence” in the movie adaptation of Burgess’ Clockwork Orange.

France is, indeed, becoming one of the most dangerous of all Western societies: 1,200 homicides each year and 1,000 attempted homicides. Crime now costs French citizens 115 billion Euros each year—twice the revenue generated from income taxes. Common criminals now confront police with automatic rifles and assault weapons, once used only by organized crime.
Police officers themselves are victims of harassment and open provocation by criminals, but receive no support from the media or authorities. When they enforce the law they are routinely accused of “racism.” Mr. Obertone reports that the police union now says offices are afraid to use force, for fear of racial consequences. Criminals therefore no longer fear the police, and their authority is further diminished when criminals get limited or no jail time. There are few deterrents to crime and criminals know it.
This undoubtedly explains why race riots in France are more frequent and violent than in any other European country. The authorities have surrendered to blackmail and have invested billions of Euros in some 700 “sensitive neighborhoods,” proving that the more you destroy, the more you are rewarded. Police rarely enter these neighborhoods for fear their mere presence could be a “provocation.” Mr. Obertone says that the media and politicians nevertheless blame the police for the high percentage of immigrants in jail. The only accepted explanations are discrimination and profiling.

The liberal view of the police.

The French judiciary system is like that of the United States in the 1960s and ’70s: the emphasis is on prevention and rehabilitation. For French sociologists and so-called experts, it is still the fashion to blame society exclusively for crime. The focus is thus on compassion for the culprit, with no regard for the victim. Basically, only recidivists are sentenced to prison, and prison terms are often suspended.
In France, 2,250 women have been raped by recidivists. According to Mr. Obertone, the real number is considerably higher, because some rapists are never caught and because some rapes are classified as “sexual assaults” and are therefore not counted as rape.
Even with low incarceration rates, prisons are at 117 percent of capacity. Socialist politicians block the construction of new jails, which they would see as an admission that society is failing. Only in the 1980s and 1990s did Americans come to realize that long prison terms are what keep a society safe.
The media hide the reality of crime in France, using euphemisms to talk about the few events they dare to mention. Criminals are “youths,” even if they are in their twenties, and savagery is sanitized with such terms as “aggravated assault” and “sexual assault.”
The government helps cover things up, launching campaigns for traffic safety and condemning domestic violence against women, although these phenomena are statistically insignificant. These campaigns detract from the real problems, and suggest a lack of political will to solve them. On the political front, everyone is silent. The Right is afraid of the Left, and the Left is afraid of the truth.

In 2005, French “youths”–Muslims and Africans–rioted throughout Parisian suburbs and other cities, leading authorities to declare a state of emergency.

And yet, there are crimes the media and politicians are happy to discuss: those against certain minorities. Fighting anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and homophobia are important priorities, and the government spends a great deal of money trying to eradicate these evils. However, Mr. Obertone notes that only 0.03 percent of the Muslims, 0.06 percent of the Jews, and 0.007 percent of homosexuals are reported victimized each year. Why single them out, when a far larger percentage—0.7 percent—of French natives are victimized each year? Despite what the media and politicians say, it is safer to be a Jew, a Muslim, or a homosexual than to be an ordinary Frenchman. Needless to say, minor acts committed against minorities are huge stories, while luridly racist crimes committed against whites are downplayed or ignored.
Mr. Obertone writes that most of the French seem to have fallen asleep in front of their TV sets and shut themselves off from what is happening in their country. Even when they realize something is wrong, they are afraid to speak up, afraid of being called a racist and thus risking their livelihoods. As it is everywhere in the West, anyone accused of racism is guilty until proven innocent.

In France there is a myriad of antiracist groups that play the role of “thought police,” and ensure that no one questions the system. These groups, generously subsidized by the government, target only one type of racism and are completely blind towards anti-white racism—even though today, one French native in ten considers himself a victim of racism.

“Death to whites.”

In his discussion about the cause of crime, Mr. Obertone refers to IQ without explicitly mentioning race. He explains that the average unskilled worker has an IQ of 92, and that the great majority of Arabs are working class. Thus, we cannot expect the same results from them as from French natives. His logic is a simple way of implying racial differences without stating them bluntly. Candor on these matters can bring criminal charges.
Despite the serious nature of the topic of this book, the tone is sometimes humorous. The author is not overly academic or sensationalist, and the book is easy to read despite its liberal use of statistics. Mr. Obertone does not make utopian promises about stopping crime; he simply presents a realistic portrait of a situation deliberately ignored by the media and politicians. But the mere appearance of a book of this kind and the reception it has received are grounds for celebration.

Comic Relief Finances Extremist and Muslim Groups

Comic Relief Finances Extremist Groups

 

From Stand for Peace
On March 15, the British charity Comic Relief will hold its high-profile fundraising telethon, Red Nose Day. Since its creation, Comic Relief has raised £800 million from mass public donations and corporate sponsors, which has gone to over 15,000 different charitable projects based both in the UK and abroad. On 15^thMarch, the 2013 Red Nose Day telethon will distribute more millions of pounds. But who gets the money?
War on Want
War on Want is a leading British charity that has received just under £1.5 million of Comic Relief’s funds. It has also obtained just under half a million pounds from the European Commission and about £160,000 from the British Government. The stated aims of War on Want include the promise “to relieve global poverty however caused through working in partnership with people throughout the world.” Such a claim suggests a forward-thinking organization that acts in the interest of progress and prosperity; regrettably, the opposite is true.
War on Want has been criticized by many individuals and organisations, including British cabinet minister Teresa Villiers MP as well as the watchdog group NGO Monitor, which issued a report that concluded:

War on Want is an extremely politicised NGO which actively promotes the Durban Strategy and uses anti-Semitic themes to attack Israel. Given WoW’s extensive political campaigning and lobbying efforts, its one-sided approach to the conflict that ignores Palestinian terrorism, and the recurring investigations by the Charity Commission, funding from the EU and UK to this NGO is highly problematic.

In 2010, War on Want produced a list of recommended books for its supporters. War on Want’s Executive Director, John Hilary, explained:

One of our volunteers asked us the other day to recommend key books for someone wanting to learn more about Palestine. For anyone seeking a first guide, Ben White’s Israeli Apartheid (Pluto Press, 2009) gives a good overview and set of sources.

Ben White is the author of Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide. He has previously written in defence of Iranian President Ahmedinejad against claims of Holocaust Denial and anti-Semitism. Further, in an article entitled, Is It “Possible” to Understand the Rise in “Anti-Semitism”?, published on extremist website CounterPunch, White linked the rise of anti-Semitism with “the widespread bias and subservience to the Israeli cause in the Western media.” He concluded, “I do not consider myself an anti-Semite, yet I can also understand why some are.”
Hilary also encouraged campaigners to read Shlomo Sand’s book, The Invention of the Jewish People, which posits that the Jews, as a single collectivity, do not exist.
Further, War on Want openly supported a tour organized by the British Committee for Universities for Palestine, which brought extremist Bongani Masuku to speak at a number of British Universities. The South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) found Masuku to have wilfully incited violence between different student groups on campus.
Hilary has blamed Jews for criticizing War on Want, claiming that investigations into War on Want’s activities were “part of an ongoing strategy by an organised pro-Israeli lobby and the Jewish press.” In the past, Hilary has been happy to work with the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPAC), an extremist Islamist group that was condemned by both the National Union of Students and a Parliamentary committee for publishing anti-Semitic materials. The founder of MPAC, Asghar Bukhari, notoriously provided financial support to the Holocaust denier David Irving.
Muslim Women’s Association of Edinburgh
In 2012, just under £10,000 was given to the Muslim Women’s Association of Edinburgh [MWAE], an Islamist group that has supported the jihadist Syed Talha Ahsan, who was extradited to the USA in 2012 on charges of providing material support to the Taliban and the Chechen Mujahideen.
The MWAE has organized an “Islamophobia Awareness Conference” for next month, which it is promoting on its website. The proposed speakers include:

• Inayat Banglawala, a radical Islamist who circulated the writings of the “freedom fighter” Osama bin Laden a few months before 9/11, and who described Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, a jihadist imprisoned for planning to set off bombs in New York, as “courageous”;
• Yvonne Ridley, an Islamist convert who founded the pro-Hamas group Viva Palestina with pro-Assad politician, George Galloway MP. Viva Palestina notoriously handed over bundles of cash to Palestinian terror group Hamas on a Viva Palestina convoy to Gaza;
• Eddi Truman, the co-founder of Islamophobia Watch, an organization with a long history of attacking anti-Islamist Muslims and defending extremist groups;

Worthing Islamic Socialand Welfare Society
Comic Relief has given £4,500 to Worthing Islamic Social and Welfare Society, a local community organization whose website promotes the works of Abul Ala Maududi, founder of the violent Bangladeshi Islamist group Jamaat-e-Islami. The Society also promotes publications of the Muslim Education Trust, including a pamphlet written by Ibrahim Hewitt, entitled What Does Islam Say?, which advocates the death penalty for apostates and adulterers and demands that homosexuals suffer “severe punishments” for their “great sin.” Further, the Society offers books by Turkish cult leader and Holocaust Denier Harun Yahya as well as Muslim Brotherhood cleric Yusuf Al Qaradawi.

Trócaire

Trocaire has received millions of pounds from the well-meaning public, who are unaware that their funds will be used for highly politicized activities. Trocaire has been accused of an anti-Semitic obsession with Israel. The charity’s Palestine co-ordinator, Gary Walsh, is the former National Coordinator of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC). The IPSC has a long history of supporting Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah — Raymond Deane, IPSC chairman, described Hezbollah’s murderous and unprovoked attack on Israeli soldiers in 2006 as “perfectly legitimate”.

 

Unsustainable

Feb  2013

by Brett Stevens.

Buzzwords let us speak without communicating. They refer indirectly to a presumed shared mission, and also reference what’s current, so they allow instant entry into the theater of relevance as seen by most of our fellow citizens. The buzzword “sustainable” has snowballed from a simple idea into a mental gridlock.
Originally used to describe self-renewing resource cultivation, “sustainable” came to mean — as do all things in a world gone mad for commerce and equality — a lifestyle. It began like many things before to reek of the type of existence that people wanted to see themselves as living, namely the opposite of what they do.
Sustainability conjured up images of the fiercely independent explorers living alone on the veldt, powered by solar panels and growing their own food. It also meant pleasant visions of ourselves as a society: noble, enlightened, having transcended all that dirty technology and primitive thinking, living in New Age harmony with nature and Utopia.
Buzzwords will make you cynical because they are not actual communication, but communication by reference. When we state our goals as a string of trendy adjectives, it becomes clear that there is no plan, and the buzzwords are serving to allow us to justify doing exactly what we were doing, with a few patches applied.
However, buzzwords conceal a hidden meaning. They are popular because people like the vision they conjure up, even if it is used to manipulate them later. People want something that can keep going without constantly consuming and destroying good things, as they intuitively perceive that our society does.
When we look at modern society historically however it becomes clear that it is not “sustainable” on any of a number of levels. The obvious ones are that it depends on constant growth, and thus constant population expansion and constant development of natural resources. It is a Tragedy of the Commons writ large, albeit a slow one.
Another level where it is unsustainable can be found in the architecture of the society itself.
It takes centuries to see the effects of any political change. We don’t have centuries since we are mortal. Even more, every generation wants to make a name for itself and to produce some kind of big change that has an emotional impact. We all want to slay the dragon and take home the princess.
The result is that we’ve been piling untested political ideas on top of each other for the last three centuries. We start with a supposition, come up with a political plan, and then after implementing it, wait about five years before assuming that it worked. Sometimes we might even wait twenty years, but that’s rare.
The result is like a rambling house. Started from a small design, it grows by additions. On a whim, people add on to what is there, without testing the underlying architecture. Soon more rooms are piled on top of the same supports. The wood groans. It awaits only a small disaster to fall.
In 1789 France, we started with the idea of political equality as a goal. The goal of society was to serve the citizens as individuals, not to govern itself as a whole, like an organic entity would. Despite numerous wars and social chaos, that didn’t kill us, we kept building onto that edifice.
Our notion is that this is like an arcology, or a city built in exclusively vertical ways so that it will use less land and be more efficient. In reality, it’s a teetering structure with no actual design, with people slapping on patches or additions where possible to “make a name for myself.”
By switching to rule by every individual, instead of letting exceptional individuals rule, we have made a Tragedy of the Commons out of our own society. People take prestige, and leave behind untested political plans piled on one another. It’s only now, centuries later, that we see the full effects.
Why does it take so long to see these effects? First, because people are slow to change. Second, because most of their effects are indirect through changes to how people live, reproduce, raise kids, have values and what they expect. Finally, because the psychological effects of government are bigger than we think.
Every act of a government is either an endorsement or a condemnation. When we make a law saying that anyone driving with a blood alcohol level of more than .10 is guilty of a crime, we have officially condoned driving around after two beers. In the same way, government legislation of sexual morality, civil rights, child care, etc. has consequences.
Our rambling house of political assumptions was never very stable, but it took centuries to see it. Now, after the carnage and disasters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, people are ready to consider that we may have taken a wrong turn, and it’s time to rip this house back to the studs and build it from a blueprint, this time.

TRAITORS Vs TRAITORS CHAOS AT BOLTONS COUNCILS COUNCIL TAX MEETING

CHAOS ERUPT WHEN PAID TRADE UNION AND MARXIST PAID LACKEYS DISRUPTED THE TREASONOUS ASSEMBLY KNOWN AS THE BOLTON COUNCIL. THAT IS RULED BY THE SUPREME TRAITORS OF THE LABOUR PARTY WHO PREFER MOSQUES TO HOMES FOR BRITISH PEOPLE!

Despite a rise in the unlawful council tax of 3.5% by the Labour led council. They have still managed to cut spending on services for the English people of £43.6 million. I can bet that they have cut the money from essential  services for the British residents of Bolton and kept the high level of spending on there ethnic allies and trade union jobs for the boys supporters who just put on a show of demonstration at said meetings to grab headlines. When as i believe they and there fellow traitors are in bed with one another to put another nail in the coffin of the true people of Bolton.

The whole episode is a sickening display of treachery and compliance in treason. all with there little unison and GMB flags why not show you true colours and fly the flag of Saudi or the Hammer and sickle. 
With a properly run and competent run council of British patriots i am sure that millions would not be wasted on PC addled culturally divisive programmes of waste, and tokenism by employing people who are not fit for purpose in there jobs , but who are there for gender or or race purposes only. And there more mediocre the better to further there common purpose aims!

Do we need IQ tests for juries? | Melanie Phillips

Do we need IQ tests for juries? | Melanie Phillips

Published in: Daily Mail

By discharging the jury which had failed to reach even a majority verdict, the judge, Mr Justice Sweeney, did not hide his astonishment and dismay at the way it had behaved.
On Tuesday, the jurors had presented him with a list of ten questions which revealed that they simply did not have a clue about what they had heard as evidence, what they had been told by himself or indeed what they were supposed to be doing there at all.
For example, they asked for a definition of reaching a verdict ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. This was despite the fact that the judge had already given them guidance on this in writing.
Mr Justice Sweeney effectively threw up his hands in despair, saying that these were ‘ordinary English words’ that he could not define any further.
Bafflingly, they asked whether a wife’s religious conviction would make her feel that she had no option but to obey her husband. But since Vicky Pryce’s religious beliefs had not even been mentioned, this was clearly totally irrelevant to the case.
Equally perplexingly, they asked whether the defendant had an obligation to present a defence. In reply, the judge reminded them he had told them that the defendant did not have to prove anything at all.
Most extraordinary of all, they asked whether they could reach a verdict based on a reason that was not presented in court and had no facts or evidence to support it.
Since a criminal trial is no more or less than a trial of the evidence, such a question revealed a fundamental lack of understanding of what a criminal trial actually is.
No wonder the judge said that some of these questions had shown a ‘fundamental deficit in understanding’ of the jury’s role, and that in 30 years of criminal trials he had not come across anything similar.
The jury’s questions open up a deeply worrying vista. Dating back to the Magna Carta in 1215, the jury system has been at the heart of our criminal justice system.
It is the historic guarantor of our liberties that people accused of serious crimes should be judged by a jury of their peers. That right has been fiercely fought for, and robustly defended during those periods of our history when it has been threatened by over-weening governments.
The tradition is believed to have its origins in Anglo Saxon custom, which dictated that an accused could be acquitted if enough people came forward to swear his innocence.
The fact that these are ordinary people, chosen more or less at random from the public, is considered rightly to be a bulwark against abuses of legal or judicial authority.
True, there have long been concerns that juries are not sophisticated enough to cope with highly complicated trials such as fraud cases. But the short trial of Vicky Pryce was hardly a complicated case.
The judge issued his guidance to the jury in clear English. And yet these jurors clearly failed to understand what he had said.
Of course it would be wrong to draw sweeping conclusions from just one trial, but it is difficult to deny that this one has exposed a breathtaking level of ignorance and stupidity.
Inevitably, the question will be asked whether the jury system is breaking down because some of the public are no longer adequate to the challenge of understanding even basic English, let alone the fundamental rudiments of a trial.
We are not allowed to know much about the jurors in a trial, so we can only speculate about the make-up of this particular panel.
Nevertheless, one is forced to conclude that this most deeply alarming development is the result of changes in British society for the worse – a breakdown in education standards, a rise in the number of people for whom English is not their first language, and a chronic inability to understand how institutions of this country operate.
So what on earth can be done to preserve our precious jury system?
In less enlightened times, the right to sit on a jury was restricted to the property-owning classes on the basis that the poor were considered too inadequate to sit in judgment.
Such a restriction now would rightfully be regarded as abhorrent and a step back from the democracy for which so many fought so long and hard.
But maybe things have reached such a pass that there is a case for some kind of basic testing of jurors’ cognitive abilities. Because otherwise the pressure from those who have already been arguing that criminal trials should be taken away from lay people and entrusted instead to judges alone will become unstoppable.
Of course, one jury that just didn’t have a clue does not spell the end of a trial system that has helped define  English justice and society for hundreds of years.
But it’s a pretty stark hint that something is going terribly awry, not merely with the justice system but with the society that it serves.

Roger Hayes - Defining the Problem | British Constitution Group

Roger Hayes - Defining the Problem | British Constitution Group

Bankers,Bradburys, Carnage And Slaughter On The Western Front in WW1

Bankers,Bradburys, Carnage And Slaughter On The Western Front

A little known historical fact that will collapse even further the reputation of the City of London - By Justin Walker

ARTICLE | from The British Constitution group

As I start to write this article, today is Remembrance Sunday and I’m listening live to the sombre but magnificent strains of Elgar’s Nimrod as the parade at The Cenotaph assembles for the nation’s annual act of remembrance to the fallen. Like almost everyone else, I’m always humbled and moved by the veterans’ march-pass to pay their respects to fallen friends and comrades – but this year I will find it particularly poignant in the light of my recent research concerning a little known fact about the outbreak of the First World War.  Let me explain.

Yesterday, I watched by sheer chance the spectacle of the Lord Mayor’s Show on television. This year’s parade for the inauguration of the 685th Lord Mayor of London, Alderman Roger Gifford, was no different from any other. As ever it was a combination of centuries old, corporate traditions, with floats and vintage vehicles representing the various Worshipful Companies, combined with local units from the armed forces along with enthusiastic and diverse community groups of children and young people. It was pageantry and modern day life parading together side by side to show off all that is best about our capital city.



Alderman Roger Gifford, the new Lord Mayor of London, enjoying his big day.
All very innocent and benign you would think. There was Roger Gifford, a banker by trade, smiling and clearly enjoying himself hugely as he doffed his large black tricorne hat to the passing parade. All around him on the VIP stand were his family, friends, business acquaintances and representatives from the City of London - people who just seemed relaxed, normal and happy.



Looking at this joyous and colourful scene on the streets of London, I was reminded of the fictional character Richard Hannay in John Buchan’s pre-First World War famous spy novel The Thirty-nine Steps. The final scene sees the hero Hannay confronting The Black Stone, the network of ingenious German spies who had morphed into the higher echelons of British society and had discovered, by the use of magnificent disguise and deception, the war-time dispositions of the Royal Navy. Having tracked them down to their secret lair on the Kentish coastline, Hannay is confronted by a scene of complete domestic normality. There is nothing about the Germans or the villa that could suggest anything other than a typical British upper middle class household at ease with itself enjoying a seaside holiday. But just one sudden flicker of recognition restored Hannay’s confidence that he had discovered The Black Stone.

Well, such a flicker of recognition also restored my confidence. As soon as I saw the giant wicker effigies of Gog and Magog on the parade, the mythical ‘protectors’ of the City of London, my confusion disappeared. The façade of decency and respectability was gone in an instant - the truth of what we were really looking at had once again been restored


Gog and Magog

For those of us who, after many years of careful and detailed research, now understand the hidden machinations of global finance and who are aware of the secretive network of criminals and traitors who seek world government on their terms, this annual spectacle of corporate celebration and respectability by people who are not household names clearly masks an evil that must now be exposed quickly and effectively.

With the exception of a few thousand very powerful people, the entire world’s population, all seven billion of us, are trapped ... trapped into a criminal debt creating banking ‘system’ that has taken hundreds of years to perfect and to come to fruition. This ‘system’ results in enslavement and servitude. It creates dreadful unhappiness amongst ordinary decent people and causes wars, debt, starvation, pollution and environmental destruction. It feeds on greed, fear and division. It forces people onto the corporate treadmills of mass mindless production and mass mindless consumption. It uses lies, deception, intimidation and entrapment at all times. It is a system that is so clever and so cunning that most of the world is completely oblivious to its existence. It is a system that allows a few winners at the expense of a huge number of losers. It is a system that considers itself to be unbeatable and indestructible and is now so arrogant that it believes it can control everything and everyone on its terms. It is a system where psychopaths and sociopaths can flourish. And without question the centre of this system, the heart of this global corporate beast is the innocent sounding Square Mile known as the City of London.

Put very simply, the banking dynasties, such as the House of Rothschild, control the political processes around the world to such an extent that their network of private central banks have the right to create money completely out of thin air and then charge interest on that ‘nothingness’. The polite term is ‘Fractional Reserve Lending’ but in reality it is just simple fraud. The result is that the whole world is currently drowning in a sea of fraudulent debt.

The USA now has a National Debt of over 16 trillion dollars, whilst the UK owes its creditors overone trillion pounds. The planned contagion of spiralling and unlawful debt is now sweeping over Europe with a renewed vigour. Greece and Spain are being torn apart by appalling austerity measures to the point that civil war or military intervention are now being openly talked about on the streets. Italy is giving all the signs that its economy is now entering into very stormy waters indeed. Ireland, Portugal, France and Belgium are already in a mess and are unlikely to see their debts become more manageable. Tens of millions of people have experienced a major downturn in their quality of life, along with their prospects for a more secure and better future, as unlawful austerity measures brought in by corrupt politicians begin to bite. Even the stronger economies of Germany, The Netherlands and Luxembourg have now been downgraded by Moody’s, the Rothschild controlled credit rating agency.

A Simple Solution To End This Madness – The Greenback:

What is happening to all of us is criminal. However, there is a very simple solution that the banking dynasties do not want you to know about.

At the height of the American Civil War, the US Treasury warned President Lincoln that further funding would be needed if the Federal North was to have the resources needed to defeat the Confederate South. The President initially went to the Rothschilds and the private banks who wanted between 24 and 36 per cent interest. Lincoln knew that if he agreed to take loans from the bankers that he would be putting his country into a debt noose that would strangle the economic prosperity out of his country and which would be almost impossible to pay off.

On the advice of a businessman with proven integrity, Colonel Dick Taylor from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln made the decision to print debt-free and interest-free paper money based on nothing more than the honour of the American Government. Called ‘Greenbacks’ because they were coloured green on one side only, the US Treasury issued 450 million dollars worth of these notes and they were immediately accepted as legal tender by a willing and grateful nation. The war was eventually won and this very popular new paper currency seemed set to continue. In the words of Lincoln himself:

"The government should create issue and circulate all the currency and credit needed to satisfy the spending power of the government and the buying power of consumers..... The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of Government, but it is the Government's greatest creative opportunity. By the adoption of these principles, the long-felt want for a uniform medium will be satisfied. The taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest, discounts and exchanges. The financing of all public enterprises, the maintenance of stable government and ordered progress, and the conduct of the Treasury will become matters of practical administration. The people can and will be furnished with a currency as safe as their own government. Money will cease to be the master and become the servant of humanity. Democracy will rise superior to the money power

Senate document 23, Page 91. 1865

$5 Greenback

However, the response by the private bankers to this sudden threat to their banking empire was swift and brutal as this extract from The Times of London in 1865 shows:

" If that mischievous financial policy, which had its origin in the North American Republic, should become indurated down to a fixture, then that Government will furnish its own money without cost. It will pay off debts and be without a debt. It will have all the money necessary to carry on its commerce. It will become prosperous beyond precedence in the history of the civilised governments of the world. The brains and the wealth of all countries will go to North America. That government must be destroyed, or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe."

On Good Friday, April 14th 1865, a lone gunman ended the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. Sadly, his Greenback legacy died with him as the private bankers managed to ‘persuade’ Congress to revoke this successful initiative in favour of the debt creating National Banking Act which eventually led to the formation of the privately run Federal Reserve in 1913. Since then, America’s unlawful debt has risen to over 16 trillion dollars.

"I have two enemies; the Southern army in front of me and the financial institutions in the rear. Of the two, the one in the rear is my greatest foe."  Abraham Lincoln

The solution for dealing with private debt-creating bankers is simple. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, to stop any sovereign government from issuing through its treasury its own interest-free money based on nothing more than the wealth and integrity of the nation. This is the big secret that the City of London would rather keep to itself. If this simple fact were to become mainstream then people everywhere would simply walk away and the entire banking system would completely collapse.

And now we come to a very little known historical episode that I alluded to at the beginning that takes this concept of the debt-free ‘Greenback’ from America to Britain ... and in so doing exposes the truly appalling values that are prevalent even today within the City of London.

The Great War And The Debt-free Bradbury Treasury Note:

Three weeks ago, as part of my ongoing research into the banking elite, I came across a fascinating book entitled The Financiers and the Nation by the Rt. Hon. Thomas Johnston, P.C., ex-Lord Privy Seal. It was written in 1934 and republished in 1994 by Ossian Publishers Ltd.

The text of this quite remarkable and rare book is available here.

In Chapter 6, entitled ‘Usury on the Great War’, I’ve selected the following paragraphs which I believe are both shocking and self-explanatory:

"
WHEN the whistle blew for the start of the Great War in August 1914 the Bank of England possessed only nine millions sterling of a gold reserve, and, as the Bank of England was the Bankers' Bank, this sum constituted the effective reserve of all the other Banking Institutions in Great Britain.

The bank managers at the outbreak of War were seriously afraid that the depositing public, in a panic, would demand the return of their money. And, inasmuch as the deposits and savings left in the hands of the bankers by the depositing public had very largely been sunk by the bankers in enterprises which, at the best, could not repay the borrowed capital quickly, and which in several and large-scale instances were likely to be submerged altogether in the stress of war and in the collapse of great areas of international trade, it followed that if there were a widespread panicky run upon the banks, the banks would be unable to pay and the whole credit system would collapse, to the ruin of millions of people.

Private enterprise banking thus being on the verge of collapse, the Government (Mr. Lloyd George at the time was Chancellor of the Exchequer) hurriedly declared a moratorium, i.e. it authorized the banks not to pay out (which in any event the banks could not do), and it extended the August Bank Holiday for another three days. During these three or four days when the banks and stock exchanges were closed, the bankers held anxious negotiation with the Chancellor of the Exchequer. And one of them has placed upon record the fact that 'he (Mr. George) did everything that we asked him to do.' When the banks reopened, the public discovered that, instead of getting their money back in gold, they were paid in a new legal tender of Treasury notes (the £1 notes in black and the 10s. notes in red colours). This new currency had been issued by the State, was backed by the credit of the State, and was issued to the banks to prevent the banks from utter collapse. The public cheerfully accepted the new notes; and nobody talked about inflation.

To return, however, to the early war period, no sooner had Mr. Lloyd George got the bankers out of their difficulties in the autumn of 1914 by the issue of the Treasury money, than they were round again at the Treasury door explaining forcibly that the State must, upon no account, issue any more money on this interest free basis; if the war was to be run, it must be run with borrowed money, money upon which interest must be paid, and they were the gentlemen who would see to the proper financing of a good, juicy War Loan at 31/2 per cent, interest, and to that last proposition the Treasury yielded. The War was not to be fought with interest-free money, and/or/with conscription of wealth; though it was to be fought with conscription of life. Many small businesses were to be closed and their proprietors sent overseas as redundant, and without any compensation for their losses, while Finance, as we shall see, was to be heavily and progressively remunerated

Emergency Bradbury Treasury Notes (printed only on one side)  

The real values of the private bankers and the City of London have been exposed for all to see. Whilst hundreds of thousands of British soldiers were dying on the killing fields of Flanders and elsewhere doing what they saw as their patriotic duty, British bankers, safely out of danger and not sharing the appalling conditions on the Western Front, were only interested in one thing – how to make obscene profits from Britain’s desperate efforts to win the war. To say that the private bankers and the City of London have the morals of sewer rats is to be extremely unkind to our little rodent friends. But this is the clincher. As a direct result of the greed and treason of the British private bankers in preventing the continuance of the Bradbury Treasury Notes, Britain’s National Debt went up from £650 million in 1914 to a staggering £7,500 million in 1919.

And this is where it all gets particularly interesting. The following is an extract from the official and current HM Treasury’s Debt Management Office website ... and it appears to be completely at odds with the account given by the Rt. Hon. Thomas Johnston.

"The threat of World War One pushed British banks into crisis; exacerbated further as half the world's trade was financed by British banks and as a consequence international payments dried up. In response to this crisis, John Maynard Keynes (the renowned economist), persuaded the Chancellor Lloyd George to use the Bank of England's gold reserves to support the banks, which ended the immediate crisis. Keynes stayed with the Treasury until 1919. The war years of 1914-18 had seen an increase in the National Debt from £650 million at the start of the war to £7,500 million by 1919. This ensured that the Treasury developed new expertise in foreign exchange, currency, credit and price control skills and were put to use in the management of the post-war economy. The slump of the 1930s necessitated the restructuring of the economy following World War II (the national debt stood at £21 billion by its end) and the emphasis was placed on economic planning and financial relations.

Why is there is no mention whatsoever of the £300 million of Bradbury debt-free paper Treasury Notes issued in 1914? Instead, it says Lloyd George, on the advice of John Maynard Keynes, used the Bank of England’s gold reserves which, according to Johnston, only amounted to £9 million. What is going on here? Who is telling the truth? Could it be that HM Government, the puppets of the City of London, don’t want you to know about the simple but effective concept of debt-free and interest-free Treasury Notes?

What Do The System-serving Politicians And "Economists" Say About The issuance Of Treasury Notes?
As soon as the concept of the debt-free and interest-free Greenback Dollar (and now the Bradbury Pound) is raised in polite conversation with either a politician or an economist, two immediate knee jerk verbal reactions occur from these system-servers.

The first is to say that if a government suddenly starts printing its own money through its treasury based on the credit and wealth of the country, instead of going through its central bank, we would be heading towards what happened in the Weimar Republic in Germany in the early 1920s where hyperinflation spiralled out of control and a loaf of bread was bought with a barrow load of almost worthless paper money.

To this I just say look again at what actually happened in Germany at that time. It was not the Weimar’s treasury but it was the privately controlled central bank, the Reichsbank, who was printing the money, coupled with the extreme actions of currency speculators and foreign investors that caused all of the problems.

Hyperinflation could not happen as a result of the Bradbury Pound, because the democratically elected government would actually ‘govern’ ... now that is novel! Speculation would be prevented, and most importantly, the newly created money would be spent on a productive economy, rather than bankers bonuses.

The second reaction from system-servers is that the country is already printing its own money – it is called Quantative Easing, that mysterious cash injection into the economy which only seems to get as far as the banks and not to where it is actually needed. Only trouble is, it is the Bank of England doing the printing and not HM Treasury. Based around government issued Bonds (promissory notes based on the wealth of the nation), this complex process only increases the National Debt and it certainly doesn’t solve anything.

The simple truth is that people who serve the system and who have been ‘educated’ by such organisations as the Fabian inspired London School of Economics (LSE), are not suddenly going to bite the hand that gives them a very good living.

So what does all of this mean for us, the people?
Before looking at this, let’s just consider for a moment what ‘money’ actually is. It is simply a convenient unit of exchange for goods and services that people have COMPLETE CONFIDENCE in. Now if HM Government were to issue debt-free and interest-free treasury notes through HM Treasury rather than the Bank of England in order to meet the needs and happiness of all the people whilst getting them out of unlawful debt, my guess is that people might have a lot of confidence in such a benign and benevolent financial system.

There is absolutely no defence for the present system whereby private bankers create money completely out of thin air for themselves to lend and then charge interest on that ‘nothingness’. The Bank of England, with its hidden controller the Bank for International Settlements based in Basel, Switzerland (often described as the Central Bank of Central Banks), dictate behind the scenes the fiscal policies and direction that our supposed sovereign and independent government must take. We are all prisoners of this utterly corrupt system and it’s time to confront it head on to collapse it.

If our government were to go down the path of a new Bradbury Treasury Note (as well as pursuing the banksters with Common Law for their crimes against humanity) then our debt burden would be removed overnight – there would be no deficit and no national debt. Under Common Law, all debts involving the use of fractional reserve lending by the central and private banks will be written off as they were arrived at by the use of fraud. Money would be immediately made available by HM Treasury to meet the essential needs of the country. The nation’s happiness, well-being and security would be taken care of without the need for an invasive and complex tax system. We would have Gross Domestic Happiness instead of Gross Domestic Product dictating humanity’s future.

None of this is rocket science – if the Spanish and Greek governments genuinely wanted to put right overnight the economic woes of their countries, they would immediately start printing and supplying interest-free and debt-free treasury notes based on the wealth and integrity of their respective countries. They would also tell the IMF, the EU and the Bank for International Settlements to go and whistle for their ‘money’! Why? Because it was created out of thin air, it didn’t exist in the first place, and the whole banking system is fraudulent ... in other words, see you in a common law court in front of a jury!!!!
Banks, money and finance must exist to serve humanity, not the other way round. Our enslavement by unlawful debt can be ended overnight with one signature by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. It really is that simple!

Socialschism,The retrograde progression towards infancy.

 

Socialschism

Feb , 2013

by Forest Johnson.

No, that’s not a typo.
But neither is it correct.
And it certainly isn’t politically correct.
To focus too much on the social, is to become schizophrenic.
To replace life with milling throngs of people and people-stuff, is to leave being human
behind, and to start down a road to nowhere very good.
I often like to refer to myself as Piltdown Man. As opposed to Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon, Homo-Sapiens, Erectus, or anything else. Whenever I am not Piltdown Man, I am a crow. And this suits me fine. As if defining myself was important anyway. I am what I am. A total mystery to others, but not so much a mystery to myself.
Ironically, though, Piltdown Man was discovered to be a fraud. There was only the one example. Lauded as the Missing Link, it turned out to be no such thing, merely a clever prank. Oh well. Or perhaps, as I prefer to look at it, that the actual Piltdown Man has yet to be discovered, because he never really died, having discovered the secret of eternal life, and thereby leaving nothing for – ah – humans, to dig up…
Socialschism.
What happens when reality is disregarded, and the eye focuses down to one rather minor aspect of life, to the exclusion of all else. Gone is life, in all its mysterious and engaging glory. Leaving only the uber-mundane quasi-reality of what I think of you and what you think of me.
The leaving-behind of being, in favour of acting-as-if. The judging judge that judges others, while providing carte-blanche for itself. My goodness. Life-not.
So it is time for a revealing new word to appear in our decaying language. One that refers to something that – unsurprisingly – has long been misnamed, like all things socialist, to make it appear the exact opposite of what it actually is:
Socialschism.
The splitting-off from life, into a quagmire of childish nitpicking, pettiness, tit-for-tat and retaliation. The never-ending childhood-gone-wrong. The antidote to inconvenient adulthood. The retrograde progression towards infancy. Infantilism, in fact, but on steroids.
There are other words suggested by this root term. None of them good.
Socialskiving: where one ignores one’s responsibilities in favour of skiving-off while the mouth jabbers on about nothing of consequence.
Social-Schislls: the ability to become socially schizoid as well as, or better than, anybody else in the room.
Schizophrenik: the end result of reading too much importance into people, and the stuff that people do. And the unintended result, to leftists, of reading Amerika, and completely failing to understand it.
Maybe it’s time for Piltdown Man to finally assert himself, and take his destined place in human evolution. To save humanity from humanity. The missing link that gets to do it differently, and evolves in its own, separate, Piltdown way, towards a quite different result.
Had enough of Homo-Sociopathens? Who could blame you? I therefore invite you to join me on a completely different evolutionary path, as, you guessed it:
Piltdown Men!

Awakening .Long time coming

Long time coming

Feb  2013

by Brett Stevens at Amerika.org.

With the recent election, a number of people have discovered that our society is heading in a “bad direction.” Marxism, an ideology that has trashed every place where it has ever been applied, is on the rise. Socially, Americans have little in common with each other. The country is broke and in the hands of bickering maniacs.
To many voices on the right, it seems like this recent outrage exploded out of the wall at the behest of Barack Obama and his minions. He converted our country overnight into this land of descent. In their view, we are all innocents who have been ambushed by this sudden Marxist, multiculturalist, and Statist golem of hatred.
However, this is short-sighted and forgets that for the last century, many people have been resistant to the conditions which made Barack Obama an inevitability. Most of them were not on the right, and almost none of them were coherent, so they amounted to protest and art and nothing more.
Like the parents of a delinquent teen who find themselves, after sixteen years of ignoring some unmet need of their child, facing a police investigation, we are denying the lengthy backstory to our current dilemma. We should have seen this coming, but we denied it because those who spoke of it were generally oppositional to our society.
From 1890 to 1999, most conservatives have fallen into a party line of freedom, liberty and free markets. They advised us even as things were getting bad to put our heads down, work hard on our stuff, and ignore what others were doing.
They forgot one thing, however: civilization inherently distributes impact of its policies to all of its members. If not direct cost, socialized cost. If not that, by foreclosure of future options based on the decisions we have made today. Civilization regulates what options are available to us.
This conservative ideology of rugged individualism carried us through many tough times because it encouraged personal responsibility and, as a result, allowed us to shrug off parasites. It never protected against social decay, however, and that context influences society as a whole, neatly ensnaring the rugged individualists.
Probably the most emblematic symbol of this conflict was the 1950s in America. On the surface, life was perfect: war won, economy booming, kids everywhere, wealth abundant. Under the surface, “problems remain”: ethnic conflict, class resentment, pluralism causing resentment, working women agitating against the family, misery and boredom.
The latter two are the most important. In the great postwar boom, everyone became a slave to the dollar. Mainly because if you didn’t want to slave, there’s another guy right over there who does, and he’ll take your place. You’ll end up selling apples in Central Park, buddy.
The fact is that we’ve made a miserable society. Modern life is ugly, harshly competitive, rewards the wrong people, pollutes everything it touches and is driven by the capricious trends and whims of special interest groups. Most people experience days of grinding boredom in redundant jobs where the bad behavior of others is the norm.
This situation is not new. People have been loathing our society for a century or more and with good cause. With each succeeding generation, the rot has become more complete. It finally found a perfect host in the Baby Boomers who starting in 1968 made it an official state religion and required talking points for the social elite.
All of the gnarly frustrated art which has come out of America and Europe during these years, from Hemingway to Burroughs to Houellebecq, has shown us what we have been fighting hard to remain in denial of: our society is rotting from within through lack of shared values, goals, hopes, dreams and/or quests. We are directionless.
The result is a society where commerce and trends have dominated everything and rendered all of it to the level of obligation. Democracy and freedom (etc) were supposed to help us escape unnecessary obligation. Instead, we’ve created more of it, by giving freedom to everyone so that they can abuse it and also sell themselves at a low price per pound.
Conservatives have failed to succeed in this environment because of our attitude of defending society. It’s popular to say that we shouldn’t pick any one political party, or ethnic viewpoint, but what about society as a whole? We shouldn’t defend it just because it’s what’s left of what we once loved.
Instead, we should recognize that this collapse has been a long time coming. Since 1789, or the Enlightenment, or maybe it’s a trap that has been with humanity since the beginning. It has rotted us away and made life miserable for many generations, and with each one we get more twisted and bitter and pass it on to our kids.
The only way out is to reform society. People should work less, and think more. They should not be forced to burn away their time on redundant or superfluous tasks. The goal should be quality of life, not quantity of people, dollars or warm bodies enthusiastic about some transient idea or another.
If our goal is to conserve, our enemy is society. We must vanquish it so that we can preserve values and common sense. That this involves re-starting civilization is a foregone conclusion. So why are conservatives defending the status quo, and compelling us to more obligation to it?

The crisis of conservatism on both sides of the pond | Melanie Phillips

The crisis of conservatism on both sides of the pond | Melanie Phillips


The agony of the US Republicans, engulfed by an existential crisis since the second term victory of Barack Obama, reminds me so much of the UK Conservatives’ similar crisis after the accession of Tony Blair to power in 1997.
That victory ushered in a three-term Labour hegemony. The Tories, aghast at the inversion of the natural order by which they assumed they had a divine right to rule, looked in bewildered mortification upon the upstart Blair whom they found it impossible to dislodge -- and arrived at precisely the wrong conclusion about both conservatism and British society. It was a fundamental error that I believe the Conservative Party is still making – and if they aren’t careful, the US Republicans will fall into the same trap.
The root of the error was to misunderstand both why the Tories lost power in 1997 and the appeal of Tony Blair. They looked at Blair-- young, telegenic, hip, with his jeans and his guitar and his ‘hey man’ and his ‘I feel your pain’ -- and they were torn between thinking he was a cynical charlatan and alternatively that he won power because he was in tune with Britain’s shift towards a more caring, sharing, emoting, tolerant, liberal society.
Wrong on all counts. Blair won above all because the Tories had made themselves unelectable. The government of John Major, which took over after the reginacide of Margaret Thatcher, had become a national joke, an embarrassment, a synonym for sleaze, arrogance and supreme incompetence.  Moreover, a number of Tory MPs just looked ... well, totally weird. The whole lot of them were viewed as totally beneath contempt and wholly unfit for government.
Blair saw his opportunity – but having concluded about his own party that its left-wing positions had made it unelectable, he took a leaf out his friend Bill Clinton’s book and triangulated his message. While remaining committed under the radar to extreme, indeed revolutionary left-wing positions – the erosion of sovereignty by closer union with the EU, mass third world immigration, multiculturalism, gay rights -- he sent out the (misleading) message that he was instinctively on the side of Middle Britain and would put right what worried them most. This was above all intolerable levels of crime and disorder and poor education standards, which in turn stood proxy for a feeling that society was breaking down.
Utterly failing to understand any of this, the Conservative party promptly fell apart. Not for nothing is it called ‘the stupid party’. Concluding that Blair possessed some shaman-like property to bewitch the electorate, and themselves still viewing every issue through the prism of economics (aka making money), they failed completely to grasp that socialism had not been defeated but had simply morphed into a mind-bending culture war against the fundamental tenets of western civilisation. Failing accordingly to grasp that language itself had been hijacked – with words such as ‘tolerance’, ‘equality’, freedom’, ‘compassion’ and many such others having been turned into their polar opposite and with the term ‘right-wing’ having become a synonym for ‘enemy of humanity’, they made two disastrous strategic errors.
The first was to circle the wagons by making shrill statements about issues like immigration or the EU. But these Tories seemed to be the same old clapped-out, weird and sleazy bunch that had been thrown out; and their shrillness was no more than a retreat to their old comfort-zone which they had themselves managed to discredit, rather than a proper dissection of the true threat posed to ordinary people by their purported left-wing champions, not just in politics but throughout the politically correct cultural establishment.
The second error they made was to reverse themselves and conclude, under David Cameron, that the reason they lost three general elections to Labour was that the Tories were seen as ‘the nasty’ party – and that they therefore had to ‘decontaminate the brand’ by being seen as tolerant, compassionate, equality and freedom-loving as the left. So the Cameroons swore undying commitment to the National Health Service, ring-fenced international aid, created a minister for (ie against) climate change, mounted campaigns against bankers and promoted gay rights.
And when they failed to win the 2010 general election, forcing them into coalition with the extreme left Liberal Democrats, the Cameroons said the reason was they hadn’t been left-wing enough. The outcome is widespread contempt on both left and right for the Conservative party– which has also managed to put itself on the wrong side of the culture war. It is significant in this regard that, even while Americans despair over their future under their President’s leadership, Cameron reportedly swoons over Obama’s political skills.
The recent history of the US Republicans is a very similar series of misreadings and strategic errors. Outraged and bamboozled in equal measure by the mysteriously enduring popularity of Bill Clinton, the Republicans decided that they too had to triangulate. The result was George W Bush’s ‘compassionate conservatism’ –his now almost forgotten signature motif before he was engulfed by Iraq – which became synonymous with big government and huge rises in public expenditure which all but bankrupted the country.
Facing a ruthlessly partisan media class that was determined to bring Bush down over Iraq and then to install Barack Obama through a wholesale corruption of truth and journalism, the Republicans panicked by circling their own wagons. Ill-served by the inflammatory shrillness of talk radio and Fox News, they failed to stamp upon the crazies and weirdos emerging in the slipstream of the mainstream Tea Party movement and allowed them to define the Republican Party in the public mind. They thus gave the impression they were incapable of thinking other than on extreme tramlines. And in the insulated arrogance of those who believe they are born to rule, they thought it was inconceivable they could lose.
Most disastrously of all, they failed to understand the true contours of the culture war. As a result, they failed to confront properly what needed to be confronted, while simultaneously making enemies of those who should have been their allies. So for example, the Republicans no less than the Democrats bought heavily into the lethal myth of the ‘moderate’ Muslim Brotherhood – while managing, through their undiscriminating anti-immigration posture, to hack off those many Hispanic voters who should have been their natural constituency because these voters are in many respects on the right side of the culture war.
Now there are signs that some Republicans at least are beginning to understand this. While siren voices still insist that the only way back to power is to commit ideological suicide, others like Bobby Jindal and Newt Gingrich appear to realise that the party has to change in ways which don’t have to sell the civilisational pass in order to connect with decency and reality.
We have yet to see whether, issue by issue, they finally get this right. But if they need a good example, they certainly should not look across the pond.

Labour Bolton Councillors Mosques and houses are of equal importance

Does Cliff know his priorities?

For over a year Bolton Council has been conducting what it refers to a consultation exercise called the Draft Allocations Plan. The Council’s reason for implementing the Allocations Plan is apparently to establish parcels of land which would be suitable for house building and incorporate public feed back into the identification of such land.  

On the 25^th of November Anthony Backhouse wrote to the leader of Bolton Council, Cliff Morris regarding an answer Mr Backhouse had received at one of Bolton Boroughs Area Forums. Mr Backhouse had been attempting to establish why, with land for house building at such a premium permission had been granted to build a Mosque on land which could have accommodated 12 or 13 houses on Gilnow Rd in Bolton. It was part of the reply from Councillor Kevin McKeon which prompted Mr Backhouse to write to the leader of the council.

Mr Backhouse asked Councillor McKeon ‘are you of the opinion that providing provision for Mosques is as important as providing housing?’ To which Councillor McKeon replied ‘yes I am’.    

 The implications which might derive from such an outlook could be very serious; as outlined in this section of Mr Backhouse’s letter: ‘I would like to point out that it is my understanding that about 9% of the population of the Bolton Borough are Muslim, and if Councillor McKeon’s opinion that providing Mosques and houses are of equal importance is an opinion shared by yourself and those people responsible for drawing up the Draft Allocations Plan I believe this should have been factored into the consultation exercise. Having studied the Allocations Plan I can see no reference to providing Mosques.’

On the 30^th December Mr Backhouse received this two sentence reply from Councillor Morris’s office: ‘The Allocations Plan is only required to show land set aside for housing. As you have noted it does not nor should it include places of worship.’

So the leader of Bolton Council has overtly avoided being candid about whether he agrees with his Labour colleague that building Mosques is as important as building houses. With so many Mosques currently dominating Bolton’s skyline Cliff Morris’s evasive approach to such a serious question must be viewed as being of grave concern, not only to all those people who do not whish to see our country dominated by Islamic theocracy but also to those in Bolton who believe the Draft Allocations Plan might be little more than a PR sham.