It all started on September 11 2001 when in audacious simultaneous raids the al Qaeda fundamentalist Islamic terrorist group killed nearly three thousand innocent people. Against this you would not think that there could be a disproportionate response, but Bush and Blair managed it with the invasion and occupation of two countries with the loss of over half a million innocent lives there. But the attitude of the Western media and politicians seems to be that the life of a farmer in Afghanistan is somehow less valuable than the life of a financial sector worker in New York. So the 200 to 1 innocent death ratio doesn’t get reported.
Let’s deal with Iraq first. There was no reason to invade. None. Yes Saddam ran a nasty and brutal regime. But if that was a good reason then why haven’t also we also invaded North Korea, Zimbabwe, Myanmar, Syria and the People’s Republic of China? And the fact is that Iraq has been a vastly more nasty and brutal place without Saddam than it was with Saddam, and remains so today. All that has been achieved is wasted lives and wasted money as a result of Bush and Blair making stupendously bad political decisions.
We are supposed, as part of our national mantra, to support our armed forces no matter what they do. They lay down their lives to serve us. This jingoism is conveniently used to hide the reality of our involvement in these two countries. All the rhetoric is about our brave boys and so any questioning of the politics is seen as being treasonable. Which is a pity in a democracy where politicians and their decisions should be held up to scrutiny. Every Prime Minister’s Question Time the various political leaders pay their respects to the latest of our brave military to give their lives in the service of the Queen. When what they should be doing is bringing them home so they don’t get killed.
So why are we in Afghanistan? The government we helped to remove, the Taliban, were in power as a direct result of the actions of our friends, the Americans, meddling in Afghani affairs, because it had a Soviet sponsored government. The Americans (and Saudis) spent $40 billion training and arming the Islamic groups there. So today we are reaping what we have sown. Americans (and Brits) are being killed by people we have armed and trained. Do taxpayers realise that our hard earned money is spent like this?
We are in Afghanistan, ostensibly, to get rid of al Qaeda. There are two problems to this supposition. Firstly why invade and occupy a whole country to get to a few hundred people? Surely there had to be a cheaper and better way? And secondly the al Qaeda just hopped over the border to Pakistan, where they were welcomed. The fact is that India and Pakistan both see Afghanistan as a convenient battleground for a proxy war between these two regional nuclear super powers. And al Qaeda are on the Pakistani side. So, once again, why are we in Afghanistan?
So, just as in Iraq, we are told that the Taliban were a nasty regime who treated their women as chattel and didn’t allow Western culture like Coca Cola and Lady Gaga. But since their downfall things have become a whole lot nastier. The opium industry has flourished, corruption is massive beyond belief and huge numbers of innocent people are meeting violent deaths. This is a country where being a policeman means setting up a road block to extort money to buy drugs with and where many associated with the ruling elite live in new palaces paid for by Western taxpayers. So what are we achieving in Afghanistan?
Which brings us to the Taliban as freedom fighters. They are trying to rid their country of the infidel crusader invaders and the immensely corrupt regime in Kabul. And the fact is that many of us put in exactly the same position would do exactly the same thing. What if London and New York had been taken over by Afghani Mujahideen who tried to impose their world view on us?
The BBC is what is known as a public service broadcaster and it is paid for by a hypothecated tax, the license fee. The principle behind this were laid down by Lord Reith and they became the BBC charter. Two principle aims of which are sustaining citizenship and civil society and promoting education and learning.
But the reality is that the BBC tries to compete against commercial television for viewing figures and in doing so it puts out pure populist rubbish like the soap opera East Enders, which was designed to compete against Coronation street. This soap opera contains very high levels of immorality and lawlessness and in doing so serve as a role model for the rest of society, the exact opposite of what the BBC should be doing as a public service broadcaster.
In addition the BBC has employed foul mouthed presenters like Jonathan Ross who think that it is OK swear on air and the BBC seem to have almost encouraged this culture of profanity, despite the fact that profanity is inversely proportional to education. So once again they are letting us down as a public service broadcaster. Lord Reith must be spinning in his grave.
And the BBC have almost unbelievable power, more than the state broadcasters in many dictatorships. The BBC have several television channels BBC 1 to 4, BBC News, BBC Parliament, BBC World News and two children’s TV channels (that is 9 channels). They have national radio channels, BBC Radios 1 to 7 and lots of local radio stations. Then there is BBC online, Europe’s most popular content-based web site. In fact the BBC is the largest broadcast news gathering operation in the world.
An additional BBC problem is that all the power resides with a left wing, liberal, university educated metropolitan elite who are totally unrepresentative of the broader population of the country.
So when we have a major breakdown in public morality, such as happened in the riots it is impossible for the BBC to not take some of the blame. Their power on public conciousness and morality is so great. If the BBC promoted the virtues of moral behaviour, nuclear families, abiding by the law, self improvement and hard work as they should then we would have a far better country. We live in a country where most people don’t even know the basics of nutrition and a healthy lifestyle, which the BBC do little about. My GigaLiving book will help correct this if people read it.
There are many problems with the BBC, it is broken and it needs fixing. It sits at the centre of national life yet it propagates views and lifestyles that are not in the best interests of society.
So Nick Clegg had blue paint thrown at him in Glasgow by an utter idiot, reported as allegedly being Stuart Rodger, who had filled an empty hen’s egg with the paint. You would wonder what went wrong with this plonkers education and parenting when he thinks that it is acceptable to attack another person.
He doesn’t seem to realise that we live in a representative democracy which gives him many routes to express his political views. He can vote in a myriad of different elections from parish level right the way up to Europe. If that isn’t enough then there are countless opportunities to engage in debate with elected politicians. Then if that isn’t enough he could become a party activist or even put himself up for election to see if other people democratically support his views. And of course he always has the option of writing a political blog.
The fact that this idiot chose blue paint presumably was something to do with Nick Clegg’s activities within the coalition. Here the paint thrower was just being outstandingly stupid. The British people democratically elected a stalemate. Clegg had no option but to form a coalition with the party that won the most seats because this is what the results showed was wanted and needed. Any and every such coalition involves compromises being made by the parties involved. The net result is a Conservative government (they won far more seats of the two partners) with very strong Liberal Democrat input.
The Liberal Democrats have brought a huge amount of influence to this coalition, out of all proportion to the number of seats that they won, this is because they hold the balance of power. So Nick Clegg has done a brilliant job for the party in having its political philosophy implemented. This is the first national taste of power and influence for the Liberal Democrats and Clegg is handling it very well indeed.
What did the idiot paint thrower want? For Clegg to not make a coalition with the Conservatives and so not do what had been voted for? Or to form a very weak coalition with the minority Labour party who were totally discredited and politically bankrupt? Either of these options would not have given the Liberal Democrats the power and influence that they now enjoy and would have been bad for the country.
Through the 1970s and 1980s in Great Britain we had an even nastier kind of socialism than usual (which takes some doing) called Militant Tendency. They were so bad and nasty that nobody in their right mind would vote for them, so they became a part of the Labour party, where their aims, aspirations, ambitions and policies could be hidden from public view whilst being advanced surreptitiously. They were like a small parasite trying to take over a bigger organism for their own benefits. In politics this is called entryism. It took a long time for the Labour leadership to grow big enough balls to kick Militant out, even though they clearly broke party rules. But eventually they did, before the parasite destroyed them.
Zoom forward around 40 years and we have a similar phenomenon, this time on the right and in America, it is called the Tea Party and it is a more right wing version of the Republican party that is using the party to advance its own agenda.
The United States of America has a fundamental problem. The last two presidents, Bush and Obama, have been abysmal and have spent immense, almost unbelievable, amounts of money that the country simply doesn’t have. With no thought to how it will ever be paid off. They only got away with this profligacy because the dollar is the world’s reserve currency so there is a big queue to buy American bonds.
America grew to be great by implementing libertarian policies with low spending, low tax government. Now they have a total muddle with high spending, low tax government and it quite simple cannot go on. America needs to cut back the size of the state, massively increase taxation, or some combination of the two. We know from looking at the rest of the world that cutting back the state works best, but it is difficult to get the state to realise this, they mostly don’t want to cut themselves back, no matter how inappropriate their spending is. They always want to spend more, just look at what Gordon Brown did.
The Tea Party movement is a grassroots, populist movement within the Republican party that seeks to achieve this return to libertarianism and their “Contract from America” contains the sensible policies needed to fix the vast economic problems that they have:
Identify constitutionality of every new law
Reject emissions trading
Demand a balanced federal budget
Simplify the tax system
Audit federal government agencies for waste and constitutionality
Limit annual growth in federal spending
Repeal the healthcare legislation passed on March 23, 2010
Pass an ‘All-of-the-Above’ Energy Policy
Reduce Earmarks
Reduce Taxes
It is a pity we don’t have a Tea Party in the UK, these are the kinds of policies we need to sweep away the evils of socialism that are embedded in our society and which cause us an immense number of social and financial problems. The recent riots, for example.
But the Tea Party has a problem. Whilst it is practising entryism on the Republican party there are some who are practising entryism on the Tea party. And what these people are doing is bible bashing. They are people who actually believe in an all powerful divine being, that are religious fundamentalists who want to impose their views on everyone else. And they are very socially illiberal. They don’t even like the knowledge of the science of evolution being taught, never mind homosexuality, the use of recreational drugs or a woman’s right to abortion. In other words they are not the sort of person that the world wants or needs to have with any sort of power in society. We have seen the effect of similar nutters running Iran.
Which makes the Tea Party a bit of a curates egg. Economically they are bang on the nail and are proposing exactly what is needed. But the illiberal Christian fundamentalist nutters who they are carrying along with them as fellow travellers are not the sort of person that any educated person wants to see anywhere near power.
So now the people who rioted and looted are going through the courts and are receiving mainly custodial sentences which are of varying lengths in proportion to their crimes. These sentences are obviously far higher than if the crimes had been committed in isolation. This is because they were committed in a riot where an anarchic group tried to take control of the streets away from the government and in doing so there was a total breakdown in the rule of law. They were committing crimes against the state.
People who tried to incite the riots online but who took no physical part in them are maybe even more guilty. They were inciting the riots to happen and they were conspirators in the whole criminality. If this sort of behaviour was allowed to run unchecked we would pretty quickly have no law and order. Society as a whole now knows that you just can’t say anything you feel like to online audiences. People must take responsibility for the consequences of their actions.
The do gooder, apologist, leftie hand wringers at the BBC and the Guardian don’t like this at all. They think that the riots and the crimes committed in them are the fault of society, or maybe the bankers, or maybe the politicians. But certainly not the fault of the people who actually committed them. This failure to hold people responsible for their actions is at the heart of the evil of the welfare state and dependency culture. It is precisely why many young girls see having babies, paid for by the state, as a career alternative to studying and working.
The sentences being handed out are very similar to those handed out for previous similar civil disturbances, such as the Bradford riots. And it is worth noting that in Britain in living memory rioting looters were shot. Also the sentences are fully supported by the vast majority of the fair minded, law abiding population.
The number of actual rioters (not opportunistic looters) was very small, just in the low hundreds nationwide. Most of these people were recidivist street criminals who were already well known to the police. Locking them all up in one go will make the streets of Britain a lot safer for the decent law abiding majority. For the courts this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to make a significant improvement to many deprived city areas around Britain. By removing one of the biggest problems they are making life a lot better for tens of thousands of people who suffer from the behaviour of this feral low life.
Let’s hope that the government is bold enouigh to implement long term reforms so that when the scum get out of prison they cannot continue their former activities.
The BBC and the Guardian have probably not noticed this, but over the last week public opinion has moved decisively to the right. You could hear it yesterday in David Cameron’s speech. No apologies or analysis of the rioters behaviour, just the simple and correct explanation that they are criminals and will be punished. This is such a refreshing breath of fresh air after more than half a century of socialist denial and excuses about the ills of our society.
The public are now mightily pissed off about working hard to pay taxes to support a criminal, feckless, parasitic underclass. And underclass who can afford expensive clothes, expensive phones and yet who did over £200 million of damage to our cities.
The reintroduction of married persons’ tax allowance. Creating economic incentives to foster nuclear families. Single parents are a bad option and are at the root of many of our social problems.
Disciplinary powers restored to parents, teachers and police. Socialist dogma has removed the ability to bring children up properly. When they do wrong it must be possible to punish them.
Removal of state hand outs for people with sociopathic behaviour. Already we are seeing the threat of the removal of social housing for those convicted of rioting. This can go much further with the removal of nuisance neighbours and dealing with the feral gangs who blight many housing estates. State hand outs should only go to good citizens.
Removal of the incentive to get pregnant as a source of income. This Cathy Come Home culture is a massive and expensive blight on our society. Homeless single mothers should be put in dormitories which they pay for with workfare.
Revamping the whole benefits system to be one of looking after genuine need instead of being a lifestyle choice, as it is at present.
New laws about anti social behaviour, especially criminal activity at demonstrations and Flash Mob criminality. These are needed firstly because currently anti social elements are getting away with it and secondly because the interwebs have changed the social dynamic.
Teaching of good citizenship and morality. In the absence of religion many people have no moral compass. The state can institute values in people that are a framework to good citizenship.
No tolerance policing. The graffiti vandals and litterers are low level sociopaths who need punishing before they become high level sociopaths.
Let’s hope that the government does all of the above, and more. Socialist dogma is a nasty disease which is at the root of most of society’s problems. This is a fantastic opportunity to get rid of lots of it and return this country to being run sensibly.
At the briefing, many of my officers wanted cast-iron guarantees from Silver Command that no individual officers would be suspended and prosecuted if we use force and a rioter became seriously injured.
This was not forthcoming. There are at least 12 County forces here now, ‘Remember Tomlinson’ was being whispered everywhere at the FCP.
Many people are becoming very angry that we refuse to move our lines and baton charge the rioters. I have run around like a blue arsed fly trying to understand why we are being ordered to stay static; the only explanation I can find is that Gold Command are concerned about the sensitivity of the target group.
So now you know why the police were just standing there watching whilst huge numbers of crimes were being committed right in front of them. The answer seems to be that they were making a political point. It looks like they were throwing their toys out of the pram because a police officer is being held accountable for killing Ian Tomlinson.
Just how petty and stupid can you get? They should be delighted that a policeman is being charged with killing Ian Tomlinson. It is only by being accountable that the police can expect to have respect from the public who pay their wages and without the co-operation of whom they would be unable to do their jobs.
And you would think that experienced policemen would be able to tell the difference between a totally innocent middle aged man just trying to get home from work and a gang of kids in hoodies blatantly trashing whole neighbourhoods just for the fun of it. Let’s hope that David Cameron tells them to do their job properly tonight and that they do what they are told.
The Daily Mail is the newspaper of choice for middle England. It is conservative with both a big C and a small c. And it has endless stories about welfare scroungers, illegal immigrants and how it is not safe to leave your home any more. It is compulsory reading for the Woman’s Institute.
The Guardian is the home of the “intellectual left” (I know that is an oxymoron) and panders to the noodle knitters with stories about how reducing government spending will be the end of the world, how evil the City of London is for making so much money for us all and how we should have an eco friendly disabled lesbian bus shelter on every corner. It is the cheerleaders to the misguided radical lefties.
So superficially these newspapers look like exact opposites, but the reality is that they are both products that are sold to target audiences so they have the content to reflect that. Where they are both identical is the way that they go about it, they both seek to make their readers angry. They seek to whip up storms of righteous indignation. And they succeed. The relationship they have with their readers is so predictable that they have become parodies of themselves. Once you understand their editorial philosophy then they both become pure entertainment, a bit like reading Viz, but a lot funnier.
And whilst we are on the subject of the Guardian, how come they carry the preponderance of advertisements for government jobs? Surely that means we would end up with a civil service full of rabid lefties who run the country into the ground and couldn’t run a drinks party in a brewery. Explains a lot.
The Chief Constable of Cleveland Police, Sean Price, and his deputy, Derek Bonnard have both allegedly been arrested under suspicion of fraud and corruption. Which brings back the eternal problem of who polices the police, or are they in reality mostly above the law? It appears that this investigation is being carried out by Warwickshire Police. Which begs the question of what happens if the accused and the investigators are both freemasons? The investigators would then in theory owe a blood oath of duty to their brother freemason that would be above their duty to the law of the land.
The handbook of masonry says: “You must conceal all crimes of your brother Masons…and should you be summoned as a witness against a brother Mason be always sure to shield him…It may be perjury to do this, it is true, but you’re keeping your obligations“.
Not that I am implying in any way that anyone involved here is a freemason or that matter would not be dealt with other than with the uttermost propriety.
Yesterday was a virtuoso display from David Cameron in the House of Commons. Before it Ed Milliband had been calling for Cameron to resign, by the end of the day it looked, once again, as if it is Milliband who should resign. Cameron had put him well and truly back in his box. And as a bonus Ed Balls took a beating too.
Cameron commanded the house, he gave clear perspective to all the problems of the hacking scandal and he laid out clear, fair and workable solutions. He tried his best to be humble and non partisan, making Ed Milliband’s narrow minded attacks look silly and childish. In fact Ed Milliband’s reply speech was obviously pre-prepared and sounded quite inane in the light of Cameron’s speech that had gone before it.
All Milliband can try and do is to go on and on about Cameron’s culpability, when it is obvious that there is none, whilst regularly giving us a Millie Dowler soundbite. He fails to apply his brain to the real issue, which is what looks like endemic police corruption. We are supposed to trust the police to uphold the law and protect us, when they are doing the exact opposite it is immensely serious. Every police force in Britain needs a good cleaning out.
Amusingly I followed the debate on an internet forum full of rabid lefties and it did not take long for them to give up watching and to stop posting. They were expecting blood on the carpet from Cameron and all they got was their leader made to look spectacularly inept. Again. Presumably the BBC and the Guardian are equally upset.
Certainly the BBC have taken the hacking story off the lead for the first time in two weeks. A measure of just how successful Cameron was. All the issues that can be answered at this time have now been answered so there is no more story. And in the real world there is famine in the Horn of Africa, the Euro is on the point of collapse and events are moving in the Arab Spring uprisings.
The BBC’s headline of yesterday in parliament is that Cameron regretted hiring Coulson. This is so mealy mouthed that it gives you an idea firstly of the extent of the Cameron victory and secondly just how institutionally biased the BBC are. They always spin stories in favour of Labour and against the Conservatives. Sometimes this is subtle and sometimes it is blatant, but with 47% of the total UK news reach it is abuse of a monopolistic position for propaganda purposes. Thankfully Cameron told us that this is something that will be looked at. About time.
Overall it was a most excellent day of TV viewing. At one point Cameron said that he was enjoying himself, and it was quite obvious that he was. By the end the opposition front bench were sitting there dejected and deflated, squirming on their seats. Their game plan had failed because it was intellectually bankrupt. If they intend to take Cameron on then they need better people to do it with. And a less stupid political philosophy.
In 2003/4 the police raided the offices of two private detectives, John Boyall and Steve Whittamore, who had been selling illegally gained information to journalists. Much of this information came from the police national computer from whence it was removed by Paul Marshall, a communications officer at Tooting police station, from whom it was then transferred to the detectives by an intermediary, retired policeman Alan King. All four were charged with their offences and received only conditional discharges!!! Makes you wonder how that happened.
The scale of the operation was pretty big. They had 305 journalists from major media groups as customers who made 13,343 enquiries. The journalists wrote for 21 newspapers and 11 magazines. Yet, knowing this, the Labour government did nothing to clean up the press.
In May 2006 the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, presented a detailed report to the House of Commons entitled “What Price Privacy?” which detailed the nefarious workings of the British press. In December 2006 there was a follow up report “What Price Privacy Now?” which listed, by publication, the number of private detective transactions that had been uncovered in Operation Motorman:
Daily Mail 952
Sunday People 802
Daily Mirror 681
Mail on Sunday 266
News of the World 182
Sunday Mirror 143
Best magazine 134
Evening Standard 130
The Observer 103
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The Sun 24
None of these were prosecuted even though there were clear breaches of the law and once again the Labour government did nothing to clean up the press, despite having it in black and white in these reports. However the media took notice and cleaned themselves up. In 2007 Colin Myler was appointed editor of the News of the World (replacing Andy Coulson) and he cleared the place out. It is reported that after he had finished only 2 of the original journalists remained.
Given the above it is amazing that the News of the World was closed down in 2011 by a witch hunt, especially over a telephone hack that took place in 2002. On this basis just about every newspaper should be shut down. And the hypocrisy coming from many journalists and politicians over the last couple of weeks has been amazing.
So now David Cameron and Rupert Murdoch have both acted very decisively and our focus will move on to other things, however what has come out of the wreckage?
There has been a big shift of power away from the media to parliament. This is possibly the biggest shift back since the Universal Register became The Times in 1788. This may not be a good thing.
The relationship between politicians and civil servants with the media are going to be very strictly controlled and monitored. Probably more than in any other Western democracy. This may not be a good thing.
We now, with the loss of the News of the World, have less media plurality in Britain, our democracy is damaged by this. This is definitely not a good thing.
There has been a massive shift in media (and especially news) power to the leftist, liberal, statist BBC. British Sky Broadcasting (BSB) is still being prevented from being a viable broadcast competitor.
The whole media landscape in Britain has swung significantly to the left. One can’t help but wonder if this was the aim of the whole exercise. It could be important when the next election comes round.
Rupert Murdoch will now have trouble in the USA. If he wins the day he will return here to sell off his newspapers and to try again to buy BSB. There is no reason why he shouldn’t own it, he is just as fit to own a broadcaster as the BBC are.
This actually represents a change to our unwritten constitution. And over the whole theatre of events it would be interesting to know who was really driving the agenda. There will be books written about this.
Just now the chattering classes are all in a frenzy because it has been revealed that the gutter press are in the gutter. Quelle surprise, next we will be hearing that bears defecate in the woods and that the Pope is a catholic. They have always been there, it is just that on the watch of the last, Labour, government their behaviour got more out of hand than usual. And far more importantly, substantial levels of police corruption were involved. We really must not take our eye off this last issue because it is the most important by far.
The police were selling private phone numbers to the press so that they could be hacked. The police were selling location details for mobile phones (called pinging). The police were selling stories. The police were not investigating the gutter press even when they had the evidence to do so. Yet these are the same police who are paid to protect us and to uphold the law. This is, by a very long way, the most important issue to come out of the current scandals, yet it seems to be getting a fraction of the news coverage of far more marginal issues. So what is happening here?
Now we have Gordon Brown blustering onto the scene, obfuscating the whole matter and looking for the sympathy vote with what looks like a fictional story. He is doing exactly what the Sun newspaper did in using his son’s condition to create a story. And the big thing here is that Brown knew what the gutter press were up to, yet he was big mates with Murdoch and Brooks and, whilst prime minister, he did absolutely nothing to try and clean them up. Why didn’t he? Cameron certainly is.
Which brings us to the leader of the opposition Ed Milliband, who was a part of the government that did nothing about the gutter press. Now he seems to have lost the plot, he is using the whole issue purely as a mechanism to attack the prime minister. He is the only person doing so. And he has completely lost sight of the bigger issues here, so keen is he to try and score cheap political points. And his director of strategy, Tom Baldwin, is an ex News International journalist who has been accused, by Lord Ashcroft, of nefarious behaviour.
Usually a big scandal story like this can hold the headlines for ten days and so for this one its time is up, it would take major revelations to maintain the impetus at the current level. Meanwhile let’s hope that the activities of the police are thoroughly investigated and cleaned up and let’s also hope that the plurality of the press isn’t damaged even further by the lynch mob.
