Liberty and knowledge

 

Free choice in education

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All Hail President Rompoy and Foreign Minister Ashton

Rompoy and Ashton have no legitimacy. When they spend our money and speak on our behalf throughout the world there will be no way for us to hold them to account for what they do.

Queen Elizabeth is an unelected, unaccountable head of state, not just of the United Kingdom, but of dependencies and former colonies scattered across the globe; the remnants of a long gone empire.

The monarchy has a place in history, but no legitimacy in a modern democracy. All that could be said for the monarchy is that its powers have been effectively removed.

This is not the case for the unelected and unaccountable members of the House of Lords, including the bishops of the established church, who happily lie about where they live to collect massive ‘expenses’
 while passing laws to interfere ever more in our lives. This affront to democracy is an even greater anachronism than the monarchy.

Monarchy, aristocracy, state religion and a secretive, establishment judiciary all have the excuse of history and tradition to justify themselves. That is a weak excuse which freedom lovers should reject.

When it comes to the United Nations, which is a clique of the victorious powers of 1945, having no democratic legitimacy; the EU, which has been cobbled together in an authoritarian way, to prevent the re-emergence of German nationalism and then to consolidate the victory in the cold war we have anti democratic affronts growing up in our own times and we should be far more ashamed of that.

To cap it all, our daily lives are run by 800 quangos spending £35 billion pounds every year. Appointed by cronies, accountable to nobody, these people are the embodiment of the snooper, nanny state that steals our money and controls our lives.

Rompoy is a parasitic nonentity put in place by a cabal of Euro oligarchs. Give him the respect he deserves. At the same time help us get rid of the unrepresentative parasites on our doorstep who really control our lives.

Being Quango’ed into a Soviet State

 

The reason why western democracies have the highest standards of living in the world and why the Soviet Union and its satellites collapsed in economic ruin is that wealth creation is driven by private enterprise.

 

When the state owns and controls most of the economy the generation of new ideas and products withers. This causes public discontent because they are deprived of the things they need and which they can see being enjoyed in freer societies. The government which cannot face letting go of the control that it has grabbed from its own citizens can only respond by ever more interference in personal choice.

 

When the Labour Government came to power in 1997 about 33% to 35% of the British economy was owned and controlled by the government. That was an unacceptably high proportion and very damaging to the efficient development of wealth creating companies. The laws we have to control monopolies and to try to stop large corporations from completely dominating a market define an unacceptable monopoly as control of one third or more of a market. On this basis the British Government had a monopoly grip on our economy even in 1997. Since then the government stake in gross domestic product (GDP) has risen to nearly 45% and it is growing at an increasing rate.

 

According to Dominic Lawson in the Sunday Times there were almost 1,200 quango’s in 2001 costing £20 billion a year to run. By last year the cost of quango’s had risen to £34.5 billion a year. In just seven years the quango bill has risen by 75% at a time when inflation has only been around 2.5% and at the moment it is close to zero.

 

This government has taken the country into near bankruptcy. We have a national debt so huge that our grandchildren we be left with trying to pay it off and it is still increasing at a rate of £200 billion a year.

 

Desperate all the time to find more money to finance their lust for control, the government continually increases taxes. The recent increase in top rate income tax from 40% to 50% will actually produce almost nothing if not even reduce the tax take because high earners will move away, but an even more damaging consequence is that the decline of the wealth producing sector will accelerate. This is the road to collapse that killed off European communism twenty years ago.

 

We need to call a halt before we are all ground into destitution and subservience. A good start is to kill off the quangos.

NICE is Nasty

 

NICE is a bloated quango which interferes in which medicines we may or may not be permitted to use. Apart from providing excessive incomes and gold plated pensions to its over sized staff, the purpose of this body was supposed to improve health care by regulating the introduction of new treatments and ending a ‘postcode lottery’ of availability. For those who may not know, quango means quasi-autonomous non-government organisation. That in turn means a mysteriously appointed, completely unaccountable bunch of politicians cronies who interfere in the lives of everybody.

 

What is often attacked and derided as a ‘postcode lottery’ is actually the healthy variation that results from local services being provided appropriately to meet local needs. Crofters in the Hebrides do not have the same health issues or requirements as coke snorting, champagne swillers in Knightsbridge. While ordinary people can recognise that, the nanny loving broadcast media and their mates in government cannot.

 

It is now reported that a sub committee this nasty NICE bureaucracy has done some work at the request of the Department of Health (HaHa – Department of Sickness Management and Drug Administration wouldn’t have quite the same ring would it?) and come up with the recommendation that Council staff and Health & Safety inspectors should be given the right to enter every parent’s home to check if you have stair gates, hot water temperature restrictors, window locks and a whole load of other stuff. Many of these things could be useful and sensible, but all of them are things to be decided by adults dealing with the needs and priorities of their lives. We all know what the result of the snooping would be. Apart from the terrible invasion of privacy, branding people with different approaches to the bureaucrats as child harming criminals and the further infantilisation of every citizen there would be prosecution of poor parents so that their difficult lives would be made impossible. The next thing would be to take some of these children into institutional care where they would be exposed to abuse and condemned to a future in which they would have a far greater likelihood of becoming criminals or abusers in adult life.

 

If all this was not bad enough, NICE also recommends a new government database to allow GPs, midwives and other officials visiting homes to log health and safety concerns they spot. These people would be asked to provide home safety advice and where necessary conduct a home risk assessment.

 

“If possible they should supply and install home safety equipment”

 

This revolting, Orwellian garbage has been put out to consultation with the intention of introducing it next year. We must tell the government clearly and quickly to scrap this stupid idea now. My own children are long grown up, but if any of these busybodies want to come and check on my grandchildren or great grandchildren in my home I can only suggest that they preserve their own safety by not exposing themselves to the risks they would face by coming here.

 

Doctors, midwives, etc. are well regarded for their professional skills and services. I wonder how people would feel about them if they are turned into Stasi style state snoopers?

Childcare Vouchers

 

Two parents who are both higher rate tax payers can receive up to £2,400 per year of public money towards their child care. Who is paying for these wealthy families to bring up their children while they follow their fulfilling lives? All of the rest of us of course, but the burden falls hardest on people with low incomes who still have to buy clothes, furniture and all the other necessities of life and for whom VAT is a bigger proportion of their commitments than it is for the wealthy.

 

In a cynical attempt to buy middle class votes the Labour Government introduced this mad scheme and now he has bankrupted the economy Gordon Brown is trying to stop it. His big problem is that he doesn’t command any authority in his own party and the Labour MP’s who are scared of losing their seats are threatening to vote against him.

 

Face up to it Gordon, you do not have the remotest chance of winning a general election whenever you call it. Having wrecked the economy, crippled business and swamped us with a multitude of idiot laws in your periods as Chancellor and PM you must spend your last months making sure that the debt burden you pass on to our children and grandchildren does not get any worse.

 

You must scrap the childcare vouchers. It will go through parliament because the Tories will have to support it. You have to ignore Caroline Flint and her mates, the country cannot afford to feather bed the wealthy. If they threaten to throw you out as PM just say thank you. Months of misery from the revolting Sun followed by a humiliating defeat at the polls will do your family and health no good. Better to go down now by doing the right thing.

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Poverty, Welfare & Big Government

 

The Labour Government set an impossible target to reduce child poverty and then it damaged the economy so badly by its excessive spending, enormous debt creation and crippling burden of bureaucracy on business that it made every one of us poorer than we should be.

 

David Cameron is quite right in saying that there needs to be smaller government and that individuals and voluntary organisations should be encouraged to take more responsibility improving their own life opportunities and assisting people close to them when they face difficult times. Our interfering state has made it increasingly difficult for people to help out with child care, volunteer in a youth group or do any kind of constructive community activity. The bureaucratic systems set up by local government and some of the huge charities have no ability to build genuine relationships with the people they are supposed to serve. Although usually well intentioned to begin with, they become self serving empires for their managers and the staff get reduced to box ticking target hunters rather than genuine carers.

 

The problem with the Tories is that they have not put forward any concrete proposals to show how they would cut the interfering state and we know that in government they will be hard to distinguish from the appalling Labour government they hope to replace.

 

The welfare dependency that has been built up over decades, including such deceptions as the incapacity system introduced by Thatcher to try to hide unemployment, cannot be wiped out overnight, but real progress must be made immediately.

 

Cameron says that people should not be worse off when they go off benefit into work. Of course not. He will not achieve that by fiddling with tax credits. The tax credit system is a costly, over complex, bureaucratic monster that needs to be scrapped. Incapacity benefit must be ended and the benefits for all people without work frozen at their current level.

 

As wages increase and benefits stay fixed the incentive to find work and not be penalised for taking it increases.

DNA, surveillance & Freedom

 

Following a European Court ruling there is to be a change in the way that DNA records are held in England and Wales. The indications are that records of those who have not been convicted of an offence will be destroyed in most cases after six years.

 

Many libertarians will instinctively feel that they should oppose the holding of DNA records of innocent people at all and I obviously understand that. I think these proposals are wrong for completely different reasons and I believe that we need to address the question of DNA thoroughly and consistently.

 

Like everybody else born in this country, my birth was registered and a birth certificate was issued which was supposed to reliably establish my identity for all kinds of purposes throughout my life. When this system was introduced many people opposed it as an infringement of personal privacy and liberty. In more than 150 years of use I am unaware of it being misused by government agencies although criminals frequently obtain birth certificates of other people in the furtherance of crime.

 

About forty years ago I was arrested when I was on a political demonstration and my finger prints were taken. I do not know whether these records are still being held, but I presume they are and it is of no interest or concern to me at all. There was some concern about privacy, accuracy and misuse when finger prints were first used in the 1880’s, but a standard was fairly quickly established and nobody has bothered much about them since. Finger print evidence has been critical in ensuring that many violent criminals have been brought to justice and the public protected.

 

Many changes in the 21^st century world have meant that birth certification is no longer a satisfactory way of establishing identity and DNA is a much more accurate and informative biometric identifier than fingerprints.

 

This brings me to the issue of the DNA database. Of course some people will be unhappy that their DNA record is kept on a database if they have not been convicted of any crime and the database is compiled by the police and the record is associated with criminals.

 

From the viewpoint of public protection there is the serious issue that approximately half of those people who have their DNA recorded on the database will go on to be convicted of a criminal offence within six years. That is a very good argument for keeping the information even if the person concerned was not convicted of anything at the time that the sample was taken. The problem, of course, is that the half who have not been convicted within the six year period may contain some future murderers, rapists or terrorists and we are now considering destroying the means by which they could be identified and brought to justice. Several murderers have already been convicted due to DNA records taken for trivial offences or incidents in which there was no conviction at all.

 

This country is now absolutely covered in CCTV cameras monitoring the movements of the vast majority of us as we go about our law abiding lives that should be private to ourselves. Masses of our private website visits, email communications, telephone conversations and other activities are being routinely stored and searched for all kinds of purposes. This is an illegitimate intrusion into privacy and freedom.

 

Being concerned about public protection and considering that the only legitimate activity of government is to ensure the safety and property of its citizens I want criminals to be prevented from committing crime and quickly caught when they do.

 

The solution is straightforward. The criminal DNA database should be continued only until it is fully replaced by a universal biometric record for everybody present in the country. Every child born should have their DNA recorded on the national database. The child’s name would be recorded within the same time limits required for existing birth registration.

 

There is an enormous difference between being able to identify a person with certainty in the event that it is required and spying into their every activity. The former is necessary and the latter is unacceptable. It is also unacceptable that people should feel unjustifiably tainted with criminality, but we must not throw away the best means of preventing crime by failing to put in place a proper system.

 

The twenty first century world requires better and more secure records than nineteenth century birth registration.

A Caution

 

The only legitimate function of government is to provide citizens with personal safety and protection of their property. While the state interferes to an ever increasing extent in the personal lives of everybody and passes ever more restrictive laws on the businesses that provide income, and goods by which we live our lives, it is repeatedly failing to do the job for which it exists.

 

A recent BBC enquiry revealed that in the east of England alone the police issued nearly 30,000 cautions for burglary, sex crimes and assaults in 2005/6. A caution is only given where there is sufficient evidence for a prosecution and yet in this large number of serious offences the police are choosing not to prosecute even though the offender has accepted their guilt.

 

The Home Office website makes a strong point about cannabis having been re-classified as a class B drug (despite the scientific evidence making it very clear that this was not justified) and that personal use of cannabis could result in a prison sentence of up to five years and fourteen years if you sell it. Using cannabis has some risk for the person doing it, although not as much as for some legal and prescription drugs, but it is not something that does harm to other people. Burglary, sex crimes and assault are violent crimes that traumatise victims and cause peoples lives to be seriously limited by fear.

 

We have more police in this country than we have ever had in our history and we also have more laws than ever before. The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police has said in today’s Sunday Times that the public are being let down by failures in the criminal justice system. Too many violent criminal and habitual re-offenders are not being dealt with effectively.

 

The public is worried by it and the police are well aware of it, but the government continues to fail to do its only proper job.

 

Our message must be clear. Stop telling us how to live our peaceful lives in our own way; stop spying on everything we do or say; stop taking most of our money away from us in taxes and then wasting it on failed bankers or stupid PC laws. Above all stop violent criminals from damaging our lives by properly enforcing the simple laws that have regulated our society for centuries and which you have now lost sight of.

 

Dangerous criminals must be taken off our streets and the rest of us must be left to live our lives.

Gordon Brown and Afghanistan

 

It is in matters where lives are daily being lost and placed at risk that we need the greatest political clarity about what we are doing and why.

 

The first thing I want to say is that the removal of the Taliban Government in 2001 was an entirely justified action. The Taliban were hosting Al Quaeda and facilitating their campaign of international terror which had culminated at that time in the murder of 3,000 people in the 9/11 attacks.

 

The criminal Taliban government with all of its disgusting oppression of women, ghastly executions and maimings had come about because of repeated international interference by world powers. There was particular responsibility by the USA and Pakistan and the previous involvement of Russia, but many nations also had a hand in it. None of this excuses or justifies the illegitimate Taliban government and its crimes.

 

Al Quaeda is a criminal organisation responsible for mass murder and terrorism. The claims of Bin Laden and his associates for religious justification are of no worth and provide no justification for their crimes. Mafia claims for the moral authority of their ‘family’ values or Somali pirates attempted justifications of ‘policing’ fishing waters in response to loss of livelihood to international fishing are in a similar league to the propaganda of Islamists. Al Quaeda is organised crime like the Mafia or piracy. It is entirely justified to bring these organised criminals to justice and to take measures to destroy their organisations. By the very nature of the threat, these actions have to be international.

 

Dealing with very dangerous crime originating in another country requires military action, but it is very different from a war. As soon as the language of a ‘war on terrorism’ was invoked by George W Bush the necessary action against Al Quaeda and its supporters was misdirected. In his speech today Gordon Brown has shown that he has not yet managed to disentangle the issues in his mind and his government will continue to fail to set clear objectives in Afghanistan which will result in the unnecessary loss of British and Afghan lives for no purpose.

 

The Karzai Government is deeply corrupt and its pretensions to democracy have been exposed as completely fraudulent. These are matters which should be of great concern to the Afghan people, but they are none of our business. It is not possible to impose functioning political systems or moral values with armies and weapons.

 

It is not our business to stop Afghan farmers growing poppies. I will not go into the stupidity of British drug laws, but heroin use in this country cannot be controlled by trying to reduce production in Afghanistan. The demand for drugs in Britain is a British issue which can only be addressed in Britain.

 

Afghanistan is a multi ethnic place divided by different language, tribal and religious affiliations. For well over a century it has not been effectively ruled by a single government from the centre and there is no likelihood that it will be in the foreseeable future. Whether this problem is resolved by allowing the country to separate into its regional groupings or to form some sort of federal or con-federal relationship is a matter for the Afghan people to work out without outside interference.

 

The immediate problem is obvious. Invading powers have destroyed the military, policing and infrastructure of the country. With immediate withdrawal of the western powers, Karzai’s corrupt state apparatus would probably fall quickly to insurgents. So what is the solution?

 

The coalition forces should immediately stop all non-military activity such as school and road building or the administration of elections. The Karzai government must be told to establish its legitimacy by creating an administration that has public support. That can only be done by negotiating with the people who hold power and influence throughout the country. Some of the people they will have to talk to will be armed and may have been fighting to remove foreign influence from the country. This is not the same as wishing to attack the USA or Britain or having delusions about setting up a worldwide Islamist caliphate.

 

The coalition military should be taken of the streets and withdrawn to defensible bases pending withdrawal. Training of Afghan police and army should be rapidly phased out. If the Afghan government want training for their state forces (and they most certainly need it) such training should be provided by commercial contractors. There are plenty of private companies in the United States, Britain, Russia and elsewhere which are mainly made up of ex military personnel and they would compete for this business.

 

The pursuit of criminals like Bin Laden, Mullah Omar and their associates must continue as must the destruction of terrorist training camps and elimination of the criminal infrastructure. This does not require mass troops on the ground. It can and should be done by increased intelligence work, special forces operations and precision attacks by missiles and pilotless drones on firmly identified terrorist targets.

 

Brown has dithered on most things as Prime Minister and Britain has been too eager to follow bad leads from America. Now is the time for clarity and decisiveness. Recognise that it is a mistake to try to export democracy or western attitudes to Afghanistan and pull out the ground troops rapidly. Re-state our determination to prevent terrorist murder on British streets by eliminating criminal organisations whether they are based in this country or elsewhere.