Oh, the drama. The Guardian is so much more subtle than the Sun or the Mail, but the journalistic craft is just the same. Look how deftly placed the word "binge" is in that headline. Look how neatly all the real issues behind this story are ignored. Everything you need to know is in the reference to drink and drugs. Nothing else to see here comrades. Move along now.
Even The Guardian nods though. Some faint trace of human spirit is to be read between the lines. How my heart warms to those poor neglected children. They have never read the Guardian so tried, misguidedly, to look after themselves. Two girls, aged four and three, with more maternal feeling for their baby brother than the woman who - true daughter of the Labour heartlands - farms them all for benefits and a free council house.
Not to worry. There's time yet. Their human instincts can be educated out of them as they were from their mother. A combination of perverse incentives and Guardian-reading teachers will sort them out.
Soon they too will be dependent; and not just on drink and drugs.
Labour wanted mass immigration to make UK more multicultural, says former adviser - Telegraph. This story proves the Labour Party knows no ethical boundaries to state power. A government should serve the people, not seek to manipulate them. Social re-engineering of the people in the interests of the governing party is no part of a government's remit. Labour cannot even deny this particular exercise was against the peoples' will. Why else did it manipulate the data? If it had thought there was popular support for re-engineering the nation to make it "more attractive and cosmopolitan", it would have campaigned for election on that basis.
Let's face it however; what nation would elect a government that despised it as unattractive and parochial? In deliberately flooding our islands with millions of unnecessary immigrants, Labour concealed its "driving political purpose" and "concentrated instead on the economic benefits". Those benefits have proved illusory, but they were never what mattered to Labour.
I feel sorry for the immigrants concerned. They have been used as political weapons to attack the people they came to live among and can hardly expect to be loved for it. Yet this was not their fault. They sought, as sane humans do, to improve the lives of their families. They disrupted their lives; removed themselves from their communities; made huge efforts in many cases to come to a place they hoped would offer more life chances. Many with strong religious and cultural beliefs came because they were encouraged to believe they need not adapt in order to live in Britain. Now we know why. They were being deliberately imported in order to modify Britain; to adapt it to them. They have been cruelly used in a campaign not of their making. It is impossible to imagine any party but Labour being so cynical and arrogant.
This was about importing Labour voters, dramatically changing the
country Labour has long despised and taking a mischievous chance to "rub the Right's nose in diversity."
It was, in short, a betrayal of the nation. Labour has
today been exposed as not merely unfit to govern, but unfit to live
among the people it so hates. All involved in this exercise should emigrate to a country sufficiently "diverse" to be "attractive" to them. Perhaps Cuba?
The British state says that 11 million people must be certified and logged by a state authority before they can safely be allowed to give their children's friends a lift to the swimming pool. This is as offensive (and revealing) a concept as could have been conceived by our uppity public "servants."
A government employee sexually abused and then killed two little girls for his sadistic pleasure. Had the school been private, its screening and hiring policies would have been challenged and its management would have been held to account for its failure to protect the children in its care. As it was a state school, its management is of course perfect. So we all become suspects instead.
Ignore all examples of child abuse by "carers" in state institutions. Ignore the risk that the database will be abused to smear, punish, and/or blackmail those who offend the state's minions. Any such incidents will be mere aberrations, for in their eyes we are the dark and they are the light. Only when that light shines upon us can we truly be safe.
You may be surprised to read that the linked BBC piece actually lists everything that is wrong with this scheme. You just have to break the code. Ignore the appeals for calm. Forget the soothing Newspeak job-titles ("chairman of the Independent Safeguarding Authority"). States have always been adept at making evil sound cuddly; consider for example the French "Committee of Public Safety". In particular, be careful to ignore all noble-sounding objectives, like "...protect children from paedophiles...". The more noble the objective sounds, the more wicked the measures the state seeks to justify.
To find the truth, look to the things any given apparatchikdenies. In this example, the Witchfinder General chairman of the ISA tells us that the scheme is NOT about;
interfering with the sensible arrangements which parents make with each other to take their children to schools and clubs;
subjecting a quarter of the population to intensive [note the weasel qualifier] scrutiny of their person lives
creating mistrust between adults and children
discouraging volunteering
So there you have it. The scheme, perfectly-described in bullet points. The truth is in there. You must just know how to look.
Councillor Kelly doesn't like America. He's much more fond of Cuba. As a proud member of Scottish Labour, he might actually be to the left of his hero, Fidel Castro. Linking to him is enough, really. His blog is equipped with a handy labour-saving (if not Labour-saving) device, in that his deathless prose is self-fisking. Just follow the link above to his latest post and shudder.
If anyone, anywhere or anything is "dark; sinister; backward", I think it's not, as Tel-boy suggests, America. While I am sure kindly Americans are suitably grateful for his considered diagnosis of their national ills, I suspect the Christians amongst them might gently refer him to Luke 4:23.
David Cameron sent me an email today. Click the link above to read it in full. He wrote;
One of the wonderful things about
living in this country is that the moment you're injured or fall ill -
no matter who you are, where you are from, or how much money you've got
- you know that the NHS will look after you.
Why does the leader of the Conservative Party praise the world's largest socialist institution? Why did he denounce Conservative MEP Dan Hannan for the interview he gave on Fox News recently? If Conservatives really believe the NHS is an efficient way to organise the provision of healthcare, why do they not advocate the same system for the provision of food, transport or housing?
Look for the #welovethenhs "hashtag" on Twitter, and you will enter an alternate universe of sentimentality and denial. If a single state provider of healthcare from general taxation were the only alternative to the American system, the NHS would not be the second largest employer in the world. Not only is it not the best alternative to the American system, it is not even a better one. If it were, cancer survival rates in Britain would be better than in America, not worse.
Why won't the British open their eyes? Why won't they compare their system with those of healthier countries? Why is support for the NHS so widespread? Why are politicians of the right so in favour of it?
In truth, they are probably not. The employees of the second largest organisation on Earth are too big a bloc vote to take on. Labour has engineered a political deadlock, which only it can break. At one point it looked like Tony Blair might have the nerve to do it, but Gordon Brown prevented him. So we continue with the worst of all possible models for universal healthcare.
As Dr. Eamonn Butler, Director of the Adam Smith Institute, said;
If a privatised health service had made many of its patients wait for
18 months for their operations, put them on trolleys in corridors when
they arrived, given more than a quarter of them an illness which they
did not have when they arrived, and confiscated the organs of their
dead babies without bothering to seek their permission, or even to tell
them, people would have blamed privatisation. For that matter if one of
its practitioners had murdered 150 of his patients, or one of its
surgeons had removed healthy kidneys instead of diseased ones, or one
of its teams had conducted smear tests so incompetently that operable
disease was not treated, while healthy women were unnecessarily
subjected to distressing operations, all this would somehow have been
put down to the reckless pursuit of profit, or to putting shareholders
ahead of patients
Dan Hannan is right. Americans would be mad to base their system on anything that resembled the NHS. They don't need to create a producer collective to ensure healthcare for all. A better system would involve no state hospitals or public-employee doctors or nurses. Provision of healthcare would be private from the hospitals to the local general practitioners. There would be a compulsory system of private insurance from qualified, competing companies. Policies would be provided under a regulated system which prohibited, for example, exclusions for pre-existing illnesses or differential premiums based on age. They would simply have to price their premiums accordingly. The government's only role would be to provide, from taxation, the means to pay the premiums of those too poor to pay. This is essentially the system in France and many other countries in the civilized world which enjoy better health than Britain or America.
If we changed there would be problems, but not the ones we fear. Our medical professionals have been entirely trained in the NHS for 60 years. They are generally not of the calibre needed to run a private system. Businesslike people in Britain currently don't choose to go into medicine. The few who train in the NHS without realising its nature from the outset, tend to leave the country when their training is done. It would take time for the culture to change. New generations of doctors would be more like other professionals; not just technically competent, but capable (as their distant predecessors were) of running a business. Those who didn't make that grade would be employed, as is right and proper, by those who did. Just like the less worldly or energetic lawyers, surveyors or engineers.
There would be transition problems. Socialists would point the finger and say it proved the NHS was right. But steadily things would improve. Fewer people would die prematurely. Patients would be treated with respect. Standards of health would rise. Cancer survival rates would pass those in the United States.
No, I certainly don't love the NHS. Neither should you.
The natural father of Peter Connelly, "Baby P", with no apparent sense of irony, is suing Haringey Council for negligence in the discharge of its duties. The council's social workers, he says, failed to protect his son. For shame.
Relationships end, of course. Fathers often have to leave their children in the care of their ex-partners. Indeed, due to what Harriet Harman might (if she were at least consistent in her foolishness) call "institutional sexism" on the part of the family courts, men can seldom obtain custody. Yet if ever a father could have done so, it was this man. If there exists a mother less fitted to the care of her child than Tracey Connelly, I hope never to meet her. His father must have known the true character of Peter's mother. Knowing it, how could he leave his son in her care?
Peter's parents lived together for the first three months of his
tragic life. After their relationship ended, and the monsters who
killed Peter moved in, the father had continued access to his son.
Given what we know now, it is hard to conceive that a loving parent
could have failed to notice his distress. A loving father with
occasional sole charge of the boy had more opportunity to clean off the
chocolate smeared on Peter's injuries than a social worker. We
are told that Peter reached out to him, screaming "Daddy, Daddy!" when
handed back to his tormentors shortly before he died. The best that can
be said for this hopeful litigant is that Peter thought him a better carer than his mum.
It's hard to think him more than slightly better.
So, the more true his accusations against Haringey's social services, the greater his own guilt. If he is innocent because he was deceived by Ms Connelly (who would have to be considerably more cunning than she looks), so much more so (given their lesser knowledge of her and access to the child) are the social workers.
If I were him, I would be too tormented with guilt to function, let alone to calculate the monetary value of my loss. But this product of the Welfare State is made of sterner stuff than me. He confidently denies all suggestions that he might be to blame. He believed his ex's explanation for Peter's injuries; that the child was "clumsy," though he had opportunities to observe Peter himself. Are we to believe he didn't know his son was on the child protection register? Are we to believe he could not discern the true nature of the brutes who lived with Peter and his mother?
I am sure he is as sincere in his claim as in his desire for £400,000 in damages. It makes sense in the warped logic of underclass Britain. How could he think himself to blame when the Welfare State denies the very notion of personal responsibility? The "caring" apparatus of the "progressive" British state deplores the concept, as witness the agonising over the cruel fate, not of the dead child, but of his killers. After all, they are not responsible either. They are the products of their social environment; mere automata to be successfully reprogrammed if only the taxpayers would not be so mean about employing enough social workers. Haringey Social Services may not like being sued on this occasion, but they share Peter's father's underlying objective; to supplant the responsibility of the parent with that of the state. If he wins his claim, they will soon realise they have been given a stick with which to beat the ungenerous taxpayers.
Not only the jobs, but the ideological integrity of its employees depends upon the notion that the citizen is a passive product of his environment; that he can't take care of himself, can't educate his children, can't look after his family without their benevolent intervention. By their own logic, as they are the only truly responsible people, this man's claim should succeed. But by the same logic, since in truth the health and welfare of every human depends on self-reliance and the loving support of family and friends, we are all damned to some (let's hope lesser) variant of Peter's fate.
It had to happen. Even Harriet Harman had to be right about something eventually. Once she realises you can't trust women in power either, she will be approaching wisdom.
In the Labour heartlands in Manchester is "The People's' History Museum," the disingenuous trading name of the National Museum of Labour History. Liberty-minded readers need know no more than that the word "People's" here is used as in "People's Republic".
While, as a registered charity, it must purport to be politically-neutral, the most cursory examination of its website will reveal its true colours. It began as the collection of the Trade Union, Labour and Co-operative History Society and holds the archives of the Communist and Labour Parties.
Since 1990, it has been funded by Manchester's local tax payers. They deserve no better. They have proved they would vote for a bacterium if it were the Labour Party candidate. The "museum" has recently secured another £7.18 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund. Nothing could better support the view of those who see the National Lottery as "a tax on stupidity". How amazing that - deep in the greatest debt in history - we have money to spare for such stuff.
An employee of the "museum" wrote to me about an upcoming exhibition to be called "Carried Away", which will illustrate the "history of protest" with photographs of demonstrators being forcibly removed by the authorities:
One of the images we are including is dated 17th May 1972 and shows a protest by the Schools Action Union in London...
I am trying to trace any of the children in the photograph (or anyone that participated in the demonstration). Your blog came up when I googled “Schools Action Union” so I was wondering if you or anyone you know was there that day.
... it’d be great if you could share any memories you have of that day with us, as it would really bring the exhibition to life if we could include first-hand accounts...
Boy, is she barking up the wrong tree. I disclosed my misguided youthful involvement in the SAU in this post, which partly explains how my journey from teenage Maoist to adult libertarian began. Somehow I doubt it is an account of Labour movement history that could ever feature in this politically-neutral "museum".
A famous trade union poster showed a mine-owning "toff" on a miner's back with some such slogan as "a miner carries enough burdens". After 63 years of Socialism in Britain, productive workers are now an exploited minority. The heavy burden they carry includes much such nonsense as this propaganda tool disguised as a "museum".
Sir Thomas Beecham said one should try everything once, except incest and folk-dancing. I quite agree. Nonetheless, God help us, Morris dancing is part of England's cultural heritage. No matter what colour face paint the dancers wear, there can be no rational objection to an authentic traditional performance in a school.
I hate all those "isms" daily used by leftist idiots as lazy substitutes for thought. However, isn't there something "raaaayshist" in the idea that white people blacking their faces is necessarily mockery? What's wrong with being black? If there's nothing wrong, what's to mock? Why should it not be seen as a compliment? Do black people actually care about this stuff? Aren't any of them offended by the absurd paternalism of the Left? I certainly would be.
These black faces are anyway nothing to do with race. The Morris Men of this tradition used burnt cork to disguise themselves when begging for money. Who can blame them? You would not catch me Morris dancing without a far more effective disguise. Seriously, the men who long ago began the tradition would never, whatever the BBC's historical advisers may have told them, have met a black person. Burnt cork simply happens to be black.
It is not enough to bemoan this nonsense. It's not funny, it's not clever and it makes the English feel uneasy in the one place where they need not be embarrassed by Morris dancing; England. It also plays into the hands of the BNP. I hope a Conservative Minister of Education in the next government will formally discipline every head teacher who has made such a stupid decision in the last decade.
A spell in detention listening to English folk music might be a suitable punishment.
The FatBigot (is he as unfat as he is unbigoted, I idly wonder) has nailed the leftist media for their sympathetic coverage of the idiots making asses of themselves on London's streets yesterday.
You see, there is a bizarre parallel universe in which socialism is the epitome of virtue despite every example of socialism in action being an object lesson in social repression and economic misery. But there's a book, a few books actually, in which the theory is set out in a way some find convincing. Others have not read any of the books but have been persuaded by summaries of those books' conclusions into believing it really can provide material comfort for all with absolutely no downside. The effect is hypnotic. Facts and practicalities have nothing to do with it. If the facts don't fit the theory it is because the facts are a tissue of lies spun by a cabal of wicked capitalist liars. Or it is because they are not true facts, true facts will only emerge once real socialism has been put into practice. All previous attempts at applying socialist theory have failed only because they were not implemented properly. This is how they think, or at least how they express themselves. It is pure, unbridled, fundamentalist religion. There is no difference between the millions killed on the orders of Stalin and Mao and the (so far) thousands killed in the name of radical Islam.
My favourite moment in my career in student politics was when a socially-inadequate Trot announced in a student union meeting - to general laughter - that there could be "no real sex until there was real socialism." I remember observing that it was certainly one theory as to why he wasn't getting any. Like all good socialist theories, it blamed the wickedness of others for his life's disappointments. At that moment, I realised - like the FatBigot - that Socialism is not a political theory, but a religion. It is The Church of Marx, the Saviour. To the faithful, it is everything. To the sane, it is a joke. To politicians, it is an opportunity to seize more power.
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