Liberty and knowledge

 

Free choice in education

Vouched safe with Libertarians.

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?

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.

A Perverted State

Pervert David Sturgess secretly filmed visitors to his holiday cottage in Ceredigion, Wales. He was rightly gaoled for 30 months. The judge said:

“the offences were a gross intrusion into people’s privacy and they were rightly devastated”

The judge is obviously right.

Poole Borough Council secretly filmed Jenny Paton at her private home. Ms Paton is rightly taking legal action against the Council for this gross intrusion into her privacy from which she is rightly devastated.

Will the snooping officials join Sturgess in gaol? Not a chance. The perversion of government intrusion into the private lives of citizens is completely out of control

We condemned East Germany for employing the Stasi secret police to spy on its own citizens. We denounced the Soviet Union for trying to control the lives of its people. We were right to condemn these disgusting tyrannies and they eventually collapsed because their people demanded freedom.

It is time for us to demand freedom. Kick out the national and local governments that take your money away in taxes and then use it to spy on you and force you to do what they demand.

Parents lie to get kids in school

Parents are being threatened with court action over telling lies to get their child into the school of their choice. I don’t advocate telling lies, but parents are absolutely right to try to get the best possible education for their children and it is an absolute outrage that the state should be threatening and intimidating parents to force their children into inadequate schools or ones which they consider to be unsuited to their child.

This is yet another example of how Britain has been turned into a soviet style tyranny where the state knows best, individuals are forced to do what the government demands and dissenters are criminalised.. The choice of education for a child is a matter to be decided between parents, their chosen school and the child themselves. It is nothing whatever to do with either national or local government, they must keep out of it completely.

Schools need to be freed from local education authorities and the dictation of what they can or cannot teach, but what needs to be done immediately is to provide vouchers to cover the cost of education for each child up to the normal school leaving age. The family will then be free to choose the schools that their children will attend irrespective of where they live, what religion they have or any other criteria. The voucher will cover the full cost of state education, but if the parents choose to send their child to a school in the private sector that has higher costs they top up their voucher from their own resources.

Education is too important for decisions about it to be stolen from families by authoritarian governments who insist that they know best when all of history tells us that they always result in the worst. The Soviet Union collapsed because it made the lives of its citizens a misery with wrong headed attempts to control every part of their lives. Our government is heading the same way. Throw it out before it is too late.

Royal Mail and The Government

  With another round of strikes announced we are all having to use other ways to communicate than the post. Of course that was happening anyway, but Royal Mail bosses and Unions have shown themselves incapable of dealing with that change and are simply making it faster.

The Government wanted to part privatise the mail, but Gordon Brown is incapable of leading his own party so he got scared and ran away from that decision as he has done with the Territorial Army, the Ghurkas, calling an election and so much else. The truth is that part privatisation would not have been a solution anyway. It was just another fudge that could not get to the heart of the problem.

That problem is that delivery of letters and parcels is now a competitive industry and no state run organisation can ever survive against the efficiency of the market. Email, texting, Skype and instant messaging are virtually free at the point of use and available to the vast majority of people. Package delivery by DHL, TNT and the host of other carriers is fast, efficient and in many cases lower cost than Parcel Force as well as providing superior tracking information and time guarantees.

While the communications union try to do a King Canute job of hanging on to the past the bosses thrash about employing casual staff and having no solutions. Soon there will be nothing left for the government to sell and the poor postal workers will all be out of a job instead of just some of them.

The legitimate job of government is to protect the safety and property of its citizens and nothing else. The state should not run businesses and it has no right to waste taxes, our money, on organisations that have been bypassed by change.

Centuries ago the King commanded that his word should be transported throughout the realm without hindrance by highwaymen and a Royal Mail might then have made some sense. If we are to have a universal postal service in the twenty first century it has got to compete effectively with the other commercial carriers. Whichever way you look at it that can only be done if it is privately owned and freed from interference by Brown, Mandelson & Co. That is the only way that any postal worker has a future.