They lied - by Richard... Sunday, September 12, 2010

They lied - by Richard... Sunday, September 12, 2010

I notice with interest that the promise to scrap hospital car park charges has itself been scrapped and the charges are to continue.

These charges have always been a bone of contention. First, they closed down the local hospitals and then replaced them with huge district generals, out in the sticks and poorly served by public transport. For those that have them, the car then becomes the obvious (and necessary) form of transport.

Having thus created this situation, the hospital authorities then slap huge, punitive taxes on car park use – and of course the roads approaching the hospitals have yellow lines. Thus, in this man's NHS, going to see a doctor might be free, but it'll cost you at least a fiver in car parking.

Then along comes the new, whiter than white coalition – which promises to abolish charges. Then leave it a few months ... and the promise is broken. That is politicians all over. How do you know when they are lying? When they open their mouths.

The trouble is that we take it. People dutifully roll over and cough up even though the charges are barely, if at all enforceable.

However, occasionally some of us have the good fortune to find that all the payment machines have been "repaired" with a liberal dose of superglue. Amazing how effective that stuff is. And if the machines don't work, you can't pay ... shame that! But it keeps the politicians honest.

COMMENT THREAD

Print ready

Down the green plug hole - by Richard...

Just as the morons in the Scottish parliament are beginning to wake up to the fact that the spending bonanza is over and there is no more money in the kitty, a report released under the Freedom of Information Act has indicated that they are going to have to find at least £8billion to fund their ludicrous climate change act passed last year.

Under the new spending constraints, where hitherto the cerebrally challenged Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs) have been convinced that money grows on trees, the report makes it clear that this funding requirement will "inevitably result" in cuts to all other portfolios.

Thus, at the most inconvenient time possible, reality gets its shoes on and goes for a stroll. Having decided on "the most ambitious attempt to cut emissions anywhere in the world", these buffoons have suddenly discovered that it costs money and, since they have got a bottomless well of gold, they're going to have to cut back on schools, hospitals, welfare, etc., etc.

In a nation of five million or so that has allowed its collective brain to rot over the decades, as it has soaked up ever-more generous tax subsidies from south of the border, it is not easy to predict quite how the people of Scotland are going to react.

But when they discover that their precious services are being cut even more savagely than expected, just to pay for their rulers' climate change ambitions, it might just be possible that they (or some of them) become a tad angry. It is not quite the stuff of revolution, but it is getting us there.

COMMENT THREAD

Print ready

No more Mr Nice Person - by Richard...

Booker has a go at the EU in his column, and very good it is indeed. It covers many of the areas we've looked at recently, plus a few extras, and the headline says it all: "Brussels has broken our power to rule."

The trouble is that Booker doesn't go far enough – but he cannot, as long as he is writing for a national newspaper. In another place, perhaps, he could have drawn the obvious conclusion from what he has to write. We need the most fundamental changes in the way we are governed. And, quite obviously, that goes way beyond changes in the faces of those who occupy the front benches in Westminster.

This occurred to me some time ago. As eurosceptics, we are not just going for the standard rotation of politicians. Inasmuch as Brussels is an integral part of our government, and our provincial government is an integral part of Brussels, we are seeking to overthrow the government and replace it with something else. There is a name for that – it is called a revolution.

That revolution is not just against Brussels – that is only part of the problem and in many ways just a symptom of the bigger problem. There are many ways in which our government behaves, which are objectionable and which owe nothing to Brussels. We have needed a revolution for a long time – perhaps since before 1926, when the wrong type of revolution was on offer and we missed a major opportunity.

Now, it is possible to have a bloodless revolution, and it can be perfectly legal – especially as successful revolutionaries are able to re-write the rule book. ex post facto, to legalise their assumption of power. But the fact of the matter is that revolutionaries cannot play by the "white man's rules" and expect to win. We have to devise our own.

The most obvious need, though, it to stop pretending and call a spade a spade. True "eurosceptics" – i.e., those who want the UK to leave the EU and become a self-governing nation again – are by definition revolutionaries. And if that is what we are, then we need to behave accordingly, learning from successful revolutions and adopting their methods where they have proven to work.

But one of the most important things we must do is reinstate a sense of fear in our rulers. In any healthy society, a government fears its people. From that stems respect. That they treat us with such open contempt is good enough evidence that they have lost their fear.

The other thing we need to appreciate is that no revolution starts off as a mass movement – any more than did the revolution and the slow-motion coup d'état that brought us into the EU in the first place. Small numbers of people, dedicated to a clearly defined cause, working closely together, are far more effective than large, public groups in the early stages.

But, for all that, no revolutionary movement ever succeeds unless the wind of history is blowing in the right direction. For decades becalmed, many of us now feel the stirring of a breeze.

It blows from the very continent that has brought us so much grief in the past, and will do again. It is not strong enough yet even to scurry a fallen leaf, but there is most definitely a whisper. When sometime soon it reaches gale force, we need to be ready. At the moment, we are not ... but we do at least know what needs to be done.

COMMENT THREAD

Print ready

No longer simple solutions - by Richard... Saturday, September 11, 2010

Day 63 is now posted - in part. I'm playing my usual trick of starting with a short post, to which I will add over the period, so that it will end up looking very different from what it does today.

I've made a small, but significant change to day 58 (5th September) where I find that not only did Churchill not mention Hitler's threat to raze British cities, neither did The Times. Yet that very issue was sufficiently newsworthy for the New York Times to have used it for its front-page headline.

You have to admit that it is a little odd that, when the German dictator makes such an overt and very public threat, the prime minister of the UK doesn't even mention it in a Commons speech and the newspaper of record does not refer to it in its own news story which covers Hitler's speech. I must now find how other newspapers treated the story. (If anyone has copies of any national newspapers for 5 September 1940, I would certainly like to know about it).

Howsoever, with the current piece, that now makes 63 daily posts on a single subject, without a break – that has to be a personal record! And, to maintain a sense of immediacy, I do not write the day's piece until the day actually arrives. With another 51 days yet to go, it is going to be interesting to see whether I can last the course (without cheating).

Living with the Battle of Britain day-on-day, though, it is inevitable that it should dominate my thoughts and find plenty of references in my other posts, and it is also inevitable that one should hanker after the rather direct and beguilingly simple solutions to some problems - you simply loaded up some bombers and sent them on a delivery errand.

Certainly, that would be an extremely attractive solution to this sort of idiocy, where we have Lord Adair Turner, Chairman of the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), in full spate again.

He is saying that the UK is likely to miss the target unless there is massive investment in wind, wave and solar. And he has also written a "strongly-worded" letter to another idiot, Chris Huhne, the energy and climate change minister. Needless to say, he is calling for the government to "ramp up" efforts to build turbines both on land and at sea.

Just one aircraft, one teensy-weensy bomb, suitably and accurately targeted, and we could be rid of both idiots in one fell swoop. All we have to do is wait for them to meet.

But such are the complexities of the modern world that we can no longer do such things – unless of course, your targets are "ragheads" in a foreign land and you proclaim yourself to be saving the free world from al Qaeda. Then, it seems, you can slaughter a considerable number of people a lot more innocent than Turner and Huhne, and walk away without a stain of your character.

No longer simple solutions though – we will have to look for a different but equally permanent answer.

COMMENT THREAD

Print ready

Who he? - by Richard... Friday, September 10, 2010

Not so very long ago, Booker and I were ruminating that there was a time once when, between us, we could have named every single minister in the government. Now, with the present lot, you get a big ho-ha about one of them, with his face all over the front page - Jonathan Doogly, or some such - and he is a complete unknown. The immediate response is one of puzzlement ... never heard of him!

There is a problem here, of course. The man doesn't look the part. Even though he is actually 45, if one saw him out on his own, one would tend to look around for his mummy or nurse. But the real point about why we neither know nor care who our ministers are is not unconnected with our tale on the working time directive.

What were once men of substance and power (some of them) are now merely messenger boys for an alien power. It is quite fitting, in a sense, that they should look the part – and be treated with the respect they deserve ... i.e., none at all.

For Cameron, though, it is a bit early in his administration to be losing ministers over low-grade sleaze – this should be more of a fin de cycle problem for dying administrations, as we saw with Major's ghastly crew of losers. With "new politics" standing for the same old corruption, but with added "yuk" factor, one tends to wonder whether The Boy's days are numbered.

We can always live in hope, not that that a change would make any difference.

COMMENT THREAD