Friday, 15 July 2011

Noted By Madame Defarge - 4 - by Richard... Friday, July 15, 2011


In the tradition of Madame Defarge, we continue to record the 274 MPs who gave away £9.8 billion of our money, with their votes.

The next in our Hall of Shame is Peter Aldous, a Conservative (In Name Only), supposedly representing the constituency of Waveney, with a slender majority of 769 – which would be easily beatable by UKIP in a seat where its candidate polled 2684 votes in the general election. He would be a worthwhile target as he believes that the European Union's institutions and mechanisms should be strengthened and that Britain should be more closely integrated with the EU.

Mr Aldous's facebook profile is here. He says his number one priority is attracting more jobs to Waveney. This has involved campaigning for better roads and railways [including the 3rd Crossing and the Beccles Loop], superfast broadband and upgrading the electricity network, so that Lowestoft "can fully benefit from the great opportunity presented by offshore wind farms".

Clearly, Aldous is "blue greenie" as well as rabid euroslime, having recently said: "Not only can offshore wind generate significant amounts of electricity, it can support a new generation of engineering skills creating long term jobs which will be key to sustainable growth".

He claims he has also campaigned to ensure that pensioners get a fair deal – notwithstanding that he wants to condemn them to fuel poverty, with his enthusiasm for one of the most expensive forms of electricity generation known to man - in classic two-faced style, also backing a campaignto "end cold rented homes".

And this certainly did not stop him tramping through the lobby to vote for giving our money away – much of it to be taken from those very pensioners for whom he professes to care so much. His personal share of this smash and grab is £36 million, which he now owes us. He can, therefore, now consider himself Noted By Madame Defrage (NBMD). The knitting grows longer.

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The band leader resigns - by Richard...


... parliament reorganises the deck-chairs, and the sound of gurgling can be heard from the lower decks.

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Littlejohn - by Richard...

"I am left with the conclusion", he writes, "that the entire political class, police and all, are rotten to the core. They deserve each other, but I'm damned if I know what we have done to deserve any of them".

Richard, we don't deserve them – and that includes the organisation for which you work and by which you are so handsomely paid. So what are you – we - going to do about it? And if the answer is "nothing", that is what we have done to deserve them.

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An international phenomenon - by Richard...


Do not even begin to think that the Murdoch "crisis" is anything special or different – anything more than a symptom of decadence. Exactly the same thing is happening in Hungary with similar results. There is a similar assault going on in Greece.

And is anyone at all surprised that, at the heart of the political crisis in Italy is Berlusconi, whose great claim to fame is that he is the head of a huge media empire? While he and the political classes lock horns, the real power in Italy is shared by the Mafia and the EU.

Once power drains away from the political classes, their behaviour will follow a general pattern – there is an archetype at work here.

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Meanwhile - by Richard...


Back in the real world, "It is very scary: the flight to gold is accelerating at a faster and faster speed", said Peter Hambro, chairman of Britain's biggest pure gold listing Petropavlovsk.

"One of the big US banks texted me today to say that if QE3 actually happens, we could see gold at $5,000 and silver at $1,000. I feel terribly sorry for anybody on fixed incomes tied to a fiat currency because they are not going to be able to buy things with that paper money".

What the bubble dwellers do not realise is that, while they are entranced with their soap opera, in their tiny, claustrophobic domain, the world order is falling apart. When the collapse comes, the hungry and the dispossessed come looking for their cause of their pain – and there will be a reckoning. The Keiser Report refers. At the moment, the propaganda keeps the population in ignorance, but it cannot last.

When they wake up, that is when people will start getting killed - and that, as Mary Ellen Synonreminds us, is a path we do not want to take. Maybe there is a window, maybe we can stop it. Maybe ... but there is not a lot of time.

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The symptoms, not the cause - by Richard...


As the Murdoch saga gets even more tedious, one gets just a slight sense that even the BBC hand wavers and some MPs are dimly beginning to appreciate that they have gone far beyond the tolerance level of ordinary people, who have long since lost interest in the ins and outs of this soap opera.

What is of some interest to a serious student of politics, however, is how it confirms the circular, introspective relationship between Westminster politicians and the London media, the collective grouping forming the substantive part of our provincial (i.e., British) political classes.

Another point of interest is how little the denizens of what we outsiders term "the bubble" understand of the reasons for their current predicament. They know nothing of the forces which are driving their narrow obsessions, and have retreated into their own tiny, self-referential world. This has little more relevance to the grander sweep of history than a TV soap opera, which it so closely resembles.

That much is illustrated by a 1500-word essay by the King of the Bubbles, Peter Oborne, who seeks to explain the genesis of what he calls the "great Murdoch conspiracy", and thereby fails completely to get to the bottom of the phenomena which are afflicting him and his kind.

The clue to his failure is the absence of two words in Oborne's piece – "European" and "Union". Here is a man who thinks he is writing about power and government, but in fact is writing about powerlessness. That is what he does not understand.

To cut a very long story short, with real power increasingly transferred to the EU and their subsidiary quangos and agencies (as well as anonymous organisations such as the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision), politicians have less and less power, and less things to do with their time. As a result, they internalise, and focus more on politicking than performance - affording huge emphasis to "self" and attendant trivia, corrupting everyone and everything they touch, asRaedwald so rightly observes.

On the other side of the coin is the media, which in part gains its power from its symbiotic relationship with politicians. As power is progressively offshored to the EU and other institutions, the media lose their influence, and with it their real power to shape events. With that, as the Spectatorhelpfully shows, their circulation declines.

More crucially, what also happens is that the role of the media changes. As politics becomes shorn of power, and therefore meaning, election success depends on presentation rather than substance. The elections become marketing exercises, in which media are crucial. Enter the Murdoch dynasty, and the current imbroglio.

No longer a power in its own right, the media too has internalised - and the Murdoch empire more successfully than most. It has dropped into "soap opera" mode, clinging to the politicians and reporting more and more on "court gossip", exerting what residual power it has by becoming the "king maker".

By this means, Murdoch has become "powerful". But it is a fragile power, exerted only on and within the bubble, because neither the media nor the provincial politicians are powerful in any real sense. They have power only over each other, their proceedings not dissimilar to the bickering and machinations of the Bourbon court in its final stages of decay.

The test of this, of course, is in EU politics. There, in the grey couloirs of Brussels, there is real power, and an almost complete absence of the personality politics that now dominates provincial British politics. Grey, anonymous men and women, who exercise real power, have no time nor need for court gossip. And they have no truck with the gossip peddlers such as the Murdoch empire has spawned. The writ of Rebekah Brooks does not run to Brussels.

Within the foetid bubble of provincial British politics, however, personalities and soap opera have filled the vacuum left by the departure of power. But that has created a closed loop effect which means that London politics, for the rest of the nation, has increasingly become a spectator sport.

Thus, we watch their proceedings on television, listen to their blatherings on the radio, and read about them, not for the information or intelligence offered, but rather in the manner of curious onlookers watching the feeding of animals at the zoo, simply for the spectacle of it. And that is where we are now.

One is almost tempted to throw peanuts at them, and would but for the mess caused. But, in power terms, that is all these performers are worth. They are a sideshow, mistaking the curiosity of the crowd for interest and engagement. Long have they ceased to understand that what they see are the symptoms of their own demise – not the cause of it. Decadence is a good name for it - and in time they will be swept away.

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Noted By Madame Defarge - 3 - by Richard... Thursday, July 14, 2011


In the tradition of Madame Defarge, we continue to record the 274 MPs who gave away £9.8 billion of our money, with their votes. The next in our Hall of Shame is Adam Afriyie, a Conservative (In Name Only), supposedly representing the constituency of Windsor. His facebook profile is here.

Mr Afriyie, so he tells us, "is known for his thoughtfulness, honesty and plain-speaking style". He has, or so he avers, "the courage to lead from the front" and a determination to gets things done. As one of those faux Tory eurosceptics, he was proud to be London chairman of Business For Sterling - alongside George "Useless" Eustice - and a spokesman for the "no" to the Euro campaign.

Currently, Mr Afriyie's biggest bitch is the MPs' expenses system which, he complains is a "complete mess" and discriminates against less well-off politicians – like himself. He claims the new system forces some MPs to subsidise their work, leaving those who could afford it to continue unhindered while less well-off MPs, like himself, are brought into disrepute.

However, this concern for the less well off (himself) did not stop him tramping through the lobby to vote for giving our money away – much of it taken from those very few, desperately poor people who are less well off than himself. And his personal share of this smash and grab is £36 million, which he now owes us. As our candidate to celebrate Bastille Day, he can now consider himself Noted By Madame Defrage (NBMD). The knitting grows longer.

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Posted by Britannia Radio at 18:03