Friday, March 29, 2013

“only a mentally ill person”


PIER LUIGI BERSANI, IS  a man in a hurry. As leader of the centre -Left group in Italy’s parliament, he was commissioned by caretaker Prime Minister Mario Monti to negotiate with other parties to find a functioning administration. But Mr Bersani has come up with a wonderful line to describe his country’s position, he is quoted as saying “only a mentally ill person” would want to run a recession hit Italy.

His comment (black humour aside) shows the masochistic depths a politician is prepared to go to  make his or her mark on history. There is either a Churchill or a Hitler struggling to get out when politicians are willing to seek office in such blighted times. Mr Bersani, one assumes, has met with little success in his mission. But his language is appropriate, not only for Italy and the rest of the euro zone; but also the UK.

Come the next election our very own troika of young, well groomed, professional politicians will court our vote. One will want to remain prime minster, another will try to disabuse him of his ambition in preference to his own. While the third will sit ready at the foot of the table to eat whatever scraps are thrown down, should another hung parliament be inflicted on this poor benighted nation of ours.

What is it that Ed Milliband thinks he can do that is any different to what Cameron is doing? Cameron knows the solution will take generations of unsympathetic sacrifice. Our national debt stands at £1.5 trillion and nothing that the chancellor has come up with so far will reduce it one iota; indeed, our year on year borrowing is set to increase. Yet Milliband thinks he has a solution that does not inflict such levels of sacrifice…it is called Keynesian economics and will result in further borrowing well above what the current chancellor is expected to make in the coming three years: which will prick- up the ears of the credit agencies and the IMF.

Milliband is not a mentally ill person, but such an ambition for himself  is becoming seen as predicated upon such a diagnosis, if he seeks to win the next election. Any politician who wins the next election is doomed to failure. For the simple reason that what needs to done to restore our economy comes nowhere near what any of the main parties are prepared to do.

During really hard times (as we are about to experience in this country) in ancient republican Rome, a dictator would emerge, for a limited period, and be given the task of restoring the republic back to health.

While I do not under any circumstance advocate a dictatorship for the UK, for however brief a period; democracy has its limitations. Limitations we as democrats must live by.

If all our politicians had been truthful to their electorate instead of point-scoring against each other as the Labour Party does today - and the Conservatives did when Labour were in power; then the nation’s interest would be truly represented instead of party interest.

But our party system is unable to transgress party opportunism, so we are left almost stranded as an ever febrile nation whose people are becoming  ever fearful for their futures and left almost panic stricken by their politician’s dishonest rhetoric, which  they hope will convince us all that they have an un-painful answer to the nation’s economic ills.

WE, UNLIKE ITALY, remain convinced as a nation that our three party first past the post system, (with the Lib-Dems courting scraps from the table) is the best way forward. Unless, that is, another party emerges that can undercut the main parties by tuning into the concerns of the British people that the other parties are out of touch with and fearful of igniting.
            
             Enter Ukip. Ukip can rally the British people to its cause because the British people, unlike the politicians of the main parties are afraid to tackle the electorate’s concerns over Europe and immigration. Ukip deserves our support, if for no other reason than by doing so it brings the Tory party back to its senses on immigration and Europe - which would mean, however, a new leader.
            
             The economic peril that faces our nation will not be challenged nearly enough by our three main parties. Their continued governance will only advance our nation’s decline into oblivion. All of the main parties have contributed to our national decline since the advancement of the liberal hegemony which began in 1909 when  Lloyd George set the seeds of the modern welfare state .
            
              Seeds that were limited in their ambition at the time, but have since grown out of control, like some colonising weed laying claim to a flourishing garden. The welfare state has grown like a cancer in the years since Lloyd George introduced the old age pension; set then at 70 when life expectancy was 45.

IF ED MILLIBAND fancies his chances as a prime minister, then he had better disabuse himself of union influence. For such influence will only retard whatever he has in mind for the nation’s recovery, Keynesianism included.  The unions will, has as been their historical purpose, anchor us in the past; and no Labour government has dared challenge them until Tony Blair and David Milliband; the latter of whom has chosen to depart from his Old Labour brother’s strangle hold on the modern Labour party .
            
            The last thing this nation needs is another Labour government. But the second to last thing this nation needs is a so-called ‘conservative’ government under the leadership of David Cameron. For the whole political class represented by the main parties are, as far as our relationship with Europe is concerned, in it together and cannot be trusted. Their rhetoric is just that, mere vacuous utterances aimed at winning support for another term during which they seek to steer us ever nearer to a United Sates of Europe.
            
             Ukip is becoming a serious democratic alternative. Like the free market in economics, there is now in operation a free market in voting. The age old three party system within the UK may now be brought to the brink of survival because of both the euro zone and the immigration crises. We have been coerced as a nation into accepting the EU. All the leaders of all the main parties believe that this nation’s future is as a canton within a United States of Europe. So what is left for a sceptical British people who wishes to cling to their sovereignty – why Ukip, no less.
            
              Ukip stands to endanger the prospects of all the main political parties. They will attract all of those who oppose EU membership, as well as the nation’s immigration flood gate. Ukip will do what the other parties dare not do. Ukip will challenge and stand full square against Europe; for they have no love for the ideal of European Federalism. But, and this is the truth, no party can reduce let alone overcome this country’s £1.5 trillion national debt. It will drag our country down. We would better prepare our people for that which they  are fated to experience, than bullshit them into believing there is an agreeable way out of our  nation’s economic predicament, as the politicians keep telling the electorate.
           
Mr Bersani is indeed right, only a mentally ill person, or one imbued with an ego of megalomaniacal  proportions, like our youthful trio, would ever want to govern over a fast becoming  insolvent nation. Yet they keep coming: they keep wanting the power, and the preening presence on the international stage – this time however, the mess they themselves created is beyond their ability to clear up.
           

           
           



Sunday, March 24, 2013

Cyprus needs a Second Amendment


THE SECOND AMENDMENT to the American constitution gives the right of every citizen to bear arms. The founding fathers were not mad and their reasons for writing it into the constitution are as valid today as they were then. Every law abiding citizen could own a gun in order to defend themselves and their family from any internal oppression, as well as any external threats to the nation’s sovereignty.
            
            On the small island of Cyprus, the government has proposed introducing a 10% levy on the savings of everyone of its citizens as part of the country’s deficit reduction. The proposition will be voted on today, and the likelihood is that it will be rejected by the island’s parliament.
            
            Now imagine for a moment President Obama imposing such an act of theft on the American saver. It would prove a perfect example of why there is a need to allow every law abiding American citizen to own guns; and they would be swiftly brought out from locked cupboards in order to oppose such larceny. Which is why no American president would dare even consider what the government of Cyprus is about to try and do, pressured by the EU, but, in particular, Germany.
            
           I bet the people of Cyprus, at this moment wished they also had a second amendment to fall back on. It would have certainly made the politicians think twice before considering such a levy; and if I were the leader of Americas National Rifle Association, I would call a press conference and explain to the American people what was happening in Cyprus, as it is a perfect example of an internal compulsion by the state on the citizens of Cyprus, which crosses the democratic Rubicon.

I HAD A REAL sense of anger when I heard what was being attempted in Cyprus against its people by the government they elected. I had even heard it suggested by a European politician that such a theft may prove necessary in Italy, France, Spain, etcetera, in the future.
            
            No doubt, if the Cypriot government gets away with this almost medieval form of taxation, then other governments in the rest of the euro zone will be tempted to follow.  Every trick is being considered by the Europhilic emperors that now oversee the continent of Europe.
            
           We have had legitimate governments being replaced by technocrats  – and where was the outrage?  Because of  people’s  apathy it never came; which left their political masters secure in their attempt to rob people’s savings from their bank accounts. This is what happens when politicians, like playground bullies, go unchallenged by an indifferent electorate.
            
           That such a thought of such a levy should enter the mind of a member of the Cypriot government, only confirms that it was considered because of the indifference of the electorate.
            
            There is nothing in any democratic constitution, in any part of the Western world, that permits politician to raid their electors bank accounts in order to cover for their failures.

BUT IN CYPRUS there was an even more sinister purpose a-foot, and one which may explain why the Cypriot people were chosen by Europe’s gangster politicians. They, it seems, knew that among the deposits in Cypriot banks, were sums amounting to many billions of dollars; and 10% of which is estimated to accrue some $3 billion to the European Union.
            
            Now, as we know, the rich are disliked by those who are not. Which, by playing on such prejudices, the Cypriot government believed that citizens throughout the rest of Europe would understand once they gained access to the knowledge that some $21 billion belonged to Russian billionaires, and was being held in Cyprus’s state bank.

But the problem is, that the ordinary depositor will also be forced to pay-up. People who have worked hard all of their lives for their children to have a future. Such depositors (unlike the Russian oligarchs) have paid the taxes demanded of them. They have abided by every tax law the island of Cyprus has presented them with…but this outrage goes well beyond the pale of legitimate revenue collection.
            
            Penalise the Russian oligarchs if you must; but only if you separate their deposits from the ordinary Cypriot citizen whose (by comparison) negligible deposits should not be part of the same raid. Those politicians seeking to take a percentage of ordinary depositors money are no different from the Russian oligarchs that they want us to believe are rich tax avoiders, and they themselves as acting as Robin Hood.

I HOPE THAT THE vote in the Cypriot parliament today will go against such a pernicious act of pilfering, as, if the latest from the news rooms are to be believed, will be the case. If such, then the politicians both Cypriot and European must look elsewhere for the billions needed to save their wretched euro.

It were they, after all, that got the continent into this mess in the first place, and the people, such as those Cypriot depositors, had better take notice of what these rascals are prepared to do to cling ever more tightly to the European Union regardless of  such futility.
           
             After the Cypriot experience, if it proves successful for the politicians, other European nations may be teased in the same way. Every means of financial procurement will be considered by the euro zone to keep this failed currency afloat. Nothing will stand in the way of those European politicians that run the union and those politicians of national governments that support the union.
            
             What the lesson of Cyprus teaches us is the length and determination to which those believers in a European Union are fully prepared to go in order to realise their dream.

THANKFULLY,THE ONLY THING Gordon Brown managed to call right was when he refused to join the euro zone. Such a decision goes a little way at least to exonerating him for his many other failures as both chancellor and prime minister.
            
             The mess brought about by a single European currency enforced over such widely diverse economies in order to bring about political and monetary union, was a disaster from the beginning. Such a union should never have included Ireland, Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy…and yes, Cyprus.
            
             It is no good going over old ground; suffice to say, Cyprus should never have been allowed such an economic foothold in the euro zone. It was a political decision, as was Portugal, Spain, Ireland and Italy, a decision born of idealism rather than any empirical judgement - which will end in the rupture of Europe.
            
             Cyprus’s case exemplifies the extent to which the European Union are prepared to go in order to realise its euro dream. A dream that will harbour a nightmare for Europe, and leave those Europhile pontiffs, not sitting astride a United States of Europe, but astride an anarchy of belligerence, standing out against every imposition they, the people, have had imposed upon them by such pontiffs.

IF THE EXAMPLE of the imposition of  technocrats on Italy and Greece, as well as the Cypriot experience, does not persuade the people of the European nations that they have entered a twilight zone, better known as the euro zone; then nothing will. Therefore the UK must distance itself further from the whole European project until the continent relieves itself of its idealism and concentrates far more on the pragmatism of any such project.
            
             The sooner pragmatism and empiricism replaces idealism, then the sooner Europe may attain some kind of unity. A unity based not upon the denial of the nation state, but upon a commonwealth of European nations working together, not through centralised dictate, but by means of national self interest.
            
             Such a commonwealth of European nations will allow each nation to determine its own national self interest, seeking alliances among other members. But when it is perceived that the whole continent of Europe is threatened; then each and every nation should be brought together to deter such a threat to the European continent.
            
             This and only this is expediency will accommodate the unreality proposed by the European Union. Unity through self interest has always been the orchestrator of Europe. Alliances between nation states, instead of dictate by the European Union of all one time sovereign states, has always been the preferred option, and so it should continue…as with Cyprus.
           
           
                         
             
            

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

The BBC and the Palestinians


THE IMAGE TRAVELLED the globe. It was of a father cradling his dead 11-month-old baby in his arms – killed by an Israeli fighter pilot. The victim’s father was an Arabic journalist who worked for the BBC; and the BBC lost no time in using the story, along with most of the worlds media. But the BBC had a particular interest, not only because of its relationship with the child’s father.

The BBC does not disguise its sympathy for the Palestinians, and its dislike for the Zionist state. When the story broke it became manner from heaven for the Palestinian side of the propaganda war; and the BBC obliged, as did other liberal bodies such as the Guardian, the Washington Post, and New York Times - the Israeli’s had shot themselves in the foot and they were going to be made to pay.

The story was never checked, simply because when it comes to normal journalistic practice, the Palestinians are trusted by the BBC because they perceive, ‘right to be on their side’. It would never occur to a BBC journalist on the ground in Gaza (they do actually have a Gaza correspondent – one was kidnapped not so long ago) to question the veracity of any claim made by Hamas. The story of Israeli brutality was the kind of pro-Palestinian propaganda that the BBC will always accept at face value. Selective impartiality is the BBC’s motto when it comes to the Palestinian cause.

NOW THE UN’S High Commissioner for Human Rights has released a report which concludes that  little Omar Jihad al-Mishrawi was not killed by the Israelis, but by a Palestinian Rocket that landed short of its target. A not uncommon occurrence, and one which the BBC’s ‘Gaza correspondent’ should have made enquiries into.

The BBC  have yet to issue  their mea culpa, and I doubt if they will. For Israel has become the new white South Africa among the liberalarte – even to the point of calling Israel an apartheid state. They have their claws well and truly into the Jewish state and the liberal media will tear up the rule book in order to see a Palestinian state come into being, even at the expense of a Jewish one.

Such ignoble practices will one day come back to haunt the liberal hegemony throughout the media in the West. But what I resent, as someone who supports Israel, is having to pay my licence tax to an organisation whose liberal sympathies I abhor. Either the BBC shows the same impartiality they claim to show throughout their news coverage, and apply the same journalistic standard toward Israel, or I and millions like myself should not be made to cough up?

The words ‘state broadcaster’ is an oxymoron when it seeks any kind of survival outside of a totalitarian state. The BBC was an anomaly created at a time when  George Orwell used the dreaded Room 101 (a real room at the BBC) in his dystopian novel 1984. The fact that he could draw upon his personal experience as an employee of a state broadcaster and create a totalitarian vision from the bureaucratic apparatus he worked under, speaks volumes about the modern BBC.
            
            The body of Omar Jihad al-Mishrawi  has been exploited by the Western media driven liberalarte to promote their own political agenda. It is quite disgraceful when you think about it. Even the child’s poor father was led to believe that the Israeli’s were to be held responsible. In being a BBC journalist, such a belief may have found easy acceptance; but this is the kind of anti-journalism that journalists serving the Palestinian cause in Gaza are required to participate in.

AS FAR AS ISRAEL and the BBC are concerned, Israel knows where they stand. The BBC cannot ever be trusted for any kind of impartiality when it comes to Israel. Israel, let us remember, is a democratic state; one of just a few in the Middle East: and the others have yet to prove themselves viable after the Arab Spring.
           
           I have no trust in what the BBC reports from Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel. I turn to Sky News for balanced reporting. Yet even this agency never challenged the events surrounding little Omar Jihad al-Mishrawi’s death. They, like the BBC, took it all at face value. But I do not believe that Sky News did this because of any anti-Israeli sympathy, but simply because they followed the media trail.
            
          A child of 11 months died, and when you think of it the child was at the start of its life; a life which may have brought some kind of reward to the human race had it been completed. Which is why it saddens me to think of abortion - an equal travesty. Little Omar Jihad al-Mishrawi had his life before him…yet he was struck down. If he had been truly killed by an Israeli fighter pilot, I would have extended the same sympathy to his poor father, that I now do.
            
          Israel has a population of nearly eight million people, a population far out-numbered by those who surround them in the Arab world. Yet Israel is seen as the villain of the peace by Western liberalism. The BBC helps to promote such villainy with their unapologetic support for the Palestinians.
           
         In supporting the Palestinian cause, the BBC, which collects over £3 billion per year in taxation from every citizen in the UK, irrespective of their political preferences, should at least pretend objectivity in their reporting of the Middle East.
        
         For instance, does the BBC, so enamoured as they are with representing  minorities, include the Jewish state in their objective reporting? I think not. The BBC, as an institution, is liberal to the core, as any employee that lives and works among the BBC knows. The Palestinians are the liberal flavour of the month and the BBC are determined to promote them as they did the ANC in South Africa.
            
        The BBC has to apologise for its part in interpreting the events surrounding the death of  little Omar Jihad al-Mishrawi. They used his death as a weapon against the state of Israel. The BBC can no longer be trusted as far as its reporting of the Palestinian cause is concerned. They are biased toward Palestinian goals. Nothing the BBC says about Israel can be accepted at face value. We must look elsewhere to find an objective analysis, and the internet is, thankfully, full of such analysis.

Friday, March 8, 2013

Chavez is dead - finally.


HUGO CHAVEZ, THE Venezuelan president is dead, thanks mainly to a “CIA induced cancer”. He reigned for 12 years and throughout his reign he helped squander the one natural resource that his country had - oil. He was a demagogue who did very little for his nation’s economy, relying on populist handouts to the country’s poor. He subsidised Cuba’s oil imports, which had (remember), stopped with the end of the Soviet Union; and he worshipped Fidel Castro above even himself.
            
              He held the poor in the permanent embrace of the state. As the Daily Mail put it; “Chavez used his country's vast oil wealth to launch social programs that include state-run food markets, new public housing, free health clinics and education”. But he did very little to invest in his country’s future. Populist handouts will always guarantee a politician his continued grip on power. But these are short term solutions: where is the infrastructure investment that would entice investment from abroad and at home? Investment that would eventually provide Venezuelans with jobs. If Venezuela continues on this socialist path now Chavez is dead, as now seems likely; then sooner or later the oil reserves will be swallowed up, partly through populist handouts, and partly through keeping, in a suicidal gesture, an extended life to Castro’s pitiful regime in Cuba.
            
            South America has always had a soft spot for a strong leader who speaks for the ordinary citizen. Eva Peron was venerated by the people of Argentina; as was Salvador Allende in Chile; Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and Emiliano Zapata in Mexico. South America has been the romantic hotspot for European leftists since the 1960s, when Che Guevara turned his back on the Cuban revolution and returned to South America; only to be hunted down and killed in Bolivia - but what an iconic image he left to posterity. There was not a single student lodging in the UK during the 1960s-70s that did not have that classic poster image decorating their bedrooms.
            
          Now we have Hugo Chavez, the latest idealistic figure to entangle the European Left. Old Hugo got around a bit and met the likes of Pope Benedict XVI, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad of Iran, Queen Elizabeth and even the blessed Tony Blair. But none of these leaders could hold a candle to Ken Livingston in their praise, who once met with his idol; and after Chavez’s death tweeted the following; Hugo Chavez showed there is an alternative to neo-liberalism and colonialism in Venezuela and worldwide,” so wrote our once socialist mayor of London, who reminded us that, he was a friend and comrade. “The best tribute for Hugo Chavez is to redouble our efforts for a world free of exploitation and colonialism #RIP”.

 This one time overseer of  8,173,194 people[1] was thankfully replaced by a Tory of sorts. It is frightening to think that such an individual was ever left in control of a city whose financial sector he ideologically opposed, yet which brought over £20 billion in taxes to the exchequer every year, and if he and his socialist friends feel they could have done without such a bounty on ideological grounds, then think of the further support to the NHS and the schools, that would suffer without such a prize – and Boris Johnson understands this.

Chavez, like Livingstone, or for that matter any socialist, desires only to spend other people’s money. They would not treat their own bank accounts as risibly as they do the state’s taxes. Socialism means state provision; and the only way such a provision can be harvested is through taxation. To socialists taxation is mother’s milk. They feel free to dispense with such billions of pounds as if they were their own.

HUGO CHAVEZ IS now to be embalmed and put on display in the mawkish way so beloved of the old Soviet Union, who displayed, wax-like, their leaders. Lenin and Stalin became a tourist attraction in Red Square where long queues of Soviet citizens and tourists from other socialist countries came daily to gawp at the two mass murderers.
            The Venezuelan generalissimo is believed to have salted away $2billion for the day when his people said enough was enough, and he retired to Cuba. He, despite his ideals, appreciated wealth just like the rest of us; yet his Left-wing followers in this country take a far more sterner view of such affluence when it comes to banker’s bonuses. Still the likes of Ken Livingstone and George Galloway will no doubt refuse to believe their champion’s acquisitiveness; blaming Daily Mail Right-wing propaganda for printing such a suggestion .

            But both Ken and George have, in comparison to the people they say they represent, healthy bank balances; indeed Ken has been accused (not by myself of course) of tax avoidance… not illegal, but frowned upon by the Left.

I DO NOT KNOW WETHER Ken and George will attend the funeral, but the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will certainly be there, as will Raul Castro, Fidel’s brother. It should be quite a gathering; one which George Galloway cannot afford not to attend. With a box of Quality Street at the ready, he could network the world’s anti-Western dictators.

            Whatever good Chavez felt he did his people, it will turn out to be a pyrrhic ‘victory’ over their poverty. For as long as the oil flows; and for as long as those who succeed Chavez continue to adopt his wasteful use of the nation’s finite resources; then the Venezuelan people that matter, will readily elect a Chimpanzee with a Chavez rosette pinned to its breast, in order to continue with the handouts. 
           
            Idealism, and I do not know why, is said to be much tolerated in our youth by older generations, who treat them with what is considered by them as a necessary condescension, in the hope that their brains develop at a quicker speed than the rest of their anatomy (wishful thinking indeed) .

 Youthful idealism can grip only the undressed essentials of impracticality; the only litmus required of such youth, is that once they embrace the rhetoric of a particular leader such as Hugo Chavez; they give heart and soul to the cause, irrespective of his human fallibility. This has been what the idealism of personality has amounted to ever since the life and crucifixion of Christ.

Chavez misled his people when alive and will surely mislead them after his death. He will become a socialist saint worshiped by  Venezuelan’s poor. But will suffer ignominy when his life is put under the microscope, as all politician’s lives are. His reputation will not survive the biographer’s pen. But even then, in Venezuela, a biographer that details his infallibility as a human being, had better stay clear of South American continent.

Hugo Chavez is dead. Let him die as millions of people die every year. He deserves no more than anyone else. To encase his hollow bodily countenance  in a glass coffin for posterity’s sake, is a perversion. He was a human being and should be treated as such ... let him recline in peace.

           
           
           

           

           






           
           

















[1] The people of London

Sunday, March 3, 2013

Just One Apology After Another


THE INDIANS DO not like us. We colonised them, looked down on them and abused many of them. At Amritsar in 1919, Brigadier Reginald Dyer, effectively ordered the execution of 379 Sikhs. An episode Churchill was to describe as monstrous, as our prime minister has pointed out on his visit to the Golden Temple.
            We were not however, the only colonial power; other powers such as France, Germany, and to a lesser extent, Belgium and Portugal also had a role to play as colonial supremacists. But of all the European colonial powers, those nations under British occupancy faired far better than did the Algerians, Vietnamese, Congolese and West Africans to mention but a few. The British were arrogant, but their leaders were not racist. They never thought of India as anything other than as a culturally advanced civilisation. Enoch Powell adored the country, and from what I have read, seemed to pine for it.
            If we were as bad as modern India sees us, then why oh why are there today over one and a half million, including  second and third generation Indians, living among us? It seems that today modern India is enjoying being our puppet master as we were once theirs. Cameron, begging bowl in hand, has delivered a Foreign Office scrutinised apology to the Indian people; this follows one for Bloody Sunday and another for the Hillsborough deaths: as well as the 1200 patients who perished at the hands at staff Staffordshire NHS.
            My immediate impression of Cameron’s visit to Amritsar, judged by the photographs and news videos I have seen, is of a man acting the role of repentant sinner (I hope it is only acting),  in order to secure business opportunities for his country. As a citizen of the UK, I found such a pitiable display of an almost a suppliant disposition awkward and discomforting; but then he opened his mouth, and the visual was supplemented by rhetoric, and I felt ashamed – for here was a statesman-beggar; a prime minister of a once great nation, being brought down: the Indians must have enjoyed it!
            Culturally speaking, the Indians are today far more snobbish than, in times past, had been the British. They find harbour in such snobbishness, for instance, against either the Afro-Caribbean or African black . In our multicultural society, for instance, the Indian is far more prejudiced against the Afro-Caribbean, in direct proportion to the way the Afro-Caribbean believe the whites are.
            India, even today, sadly shows far more prejudice among themselves than the British Empire ever expressed toward them. In the UK, historically, the class system has been the  great bugbear. But in India the caste system has been far worse. The untouchables, even to this day, are seen as nothing that should be regarded as anything less than a lower order of animal life; and they have always been treated as such historically.
            When the British first walked into India, they were given a lesson in barbarity by the Indians themselves. They were introduced to the caste system whereby the so-called untouchables were placed in servitude; a servitude comparable to black slavery in the American South. The menial and repellent tasks such as the disposal of human sewage were laid at the untouchables feet.
            Yet such slavery, even to this day, lay not at the feet of their one-time colonial masters; but at the feet of Indian culture. The caste system still to this day exists; but Cameron will remain silent about it, for the acquisition of Indian gold is his main objective.

INDIA HAS BEEN home to the most class ridden culture on this planet. I know the UK  has long been considered to have held on to this title. But we never had an untouchable class – a class like the Jews, that Nazism sought to drive to extinction. The word untouchable, describes the snobbery, not only of India’s elite but also of almost every Hindu or any of the other of the 21 regional accents.
            David Cameron should be ashamed of himself for prostrating himself before a once colonial nation that hates our guts. He should, for the sake of his people’s dignity, not kow-tow to any other nation – especially one that still overplays a terrible incident in out colonial history. A shameful incident, but one, which in its seriousness, is ill-compared to the brutalities that exist in India today.
            Amritsar was a criminal act that was never punished by the British. But to keep it alive 94 years after it took place to remind  the Indian people of Britain’s “cruelties” to this very day, is a stain upon future relationships between the two nations. But to Cameron, after Bloody Sunday and Hillsborough, it is becoming second nature for a British prime minister to stand before parliament and apologise for their nation’s history.
            Cameron has been criticised in India for blocking Indian students from coming to the UK to study. But as Cameron pointed out, such applications were to colleges that did not exist.
            Yet Cameron, while unapologetic for such abuses of the system, still welcomes Indian students to study at our better accredited universities. In other words, we are educating our competitors, in order that they can go home, in this case to India, but also to any other once colonised nation, and use the knowledge and skills that our premier universities have taught them, in order to benefit their nation’s advancement at the expense of our own. If India does not see this as sufficient payment for Amritsar, then I know not what else will suffice.

WE ARE FOREVER apologising for our past, when in fact such admissions of guilt are not required by the facts. We once were (I hesitate to say still are) a great nation on the stage of human history. There is nothing to apologise for. If we in some way carried out acts of injustice toward any of our colonies, then they were a meagre serving compared to what these cultures readily served up to their own people before our arrival.
While this does not justify our cruelties as an imperial power; it certainly should add a new perspective to what was happening before we arrived; which has never been considered in the modern age of the liberal imperium.
Our youth have, since the mid 1960s, been nursed into imperial guilt, especially at university level. It has continued up to today. But it has spread beyond academia into all levels of education to this day, where the virus has been well established into the age of the liberal imperium.
The liberal imperium requires confession after confession; and whatever our one-time colonies see fit to demand from us in the way of recompense, the imperium is all too ready to oblige. Thus we see a British prime minister, in effect, apologising for our past. It is better to starve than go cap in hand, as it appears David Cameron has done with regard to his visit to India.
Our nation’s decline is exemplified by Cameron’s humiliating behaviour on the Indian continent. If a nation  has to apologise for its past, it is truly a nation in decline: and so it appears when we have to go begging to a one time colony for business; especially after the colony has already struck up a military deal with France in preference to the UK, thus teasing us as mere supplicants to plead our case.
The Amritsar regret is the minimal requirement the Indians found was needed from David Cameron in order to qualify for Indian business orders. If this does not represent a once proud nation now in decline; I do not know what is.
           


            

Friday, March 1, 2013

Brewers ‘final solution’?


COLIN BREWER HAS BEEN a councillor for over 25 years, and is now coming under pressure to resign his Cornish seat on the council.
What was it that Mr Brewer did to invite such a demand? He made remarks against disabled people at an equalities event at County Hall. His remarks were made to Theresa Court, who works for Disability Cornwall in October 2011; and were to the effect that all disabled people should be put down, as they are a cost liability on ever meagre council resources.
             Mr Brewer has apologised for his remarks in an interview he gave to BBC Radio Cornwell; and the reason he gives for his comments was that he had just come, hot under the collar, from a council meeting where it was discussing budget cuts. What Mr Brewer implies is that the meeting left him angry and agitated, and his remarks flowed from his lips as a consequence of the pressure the meeting put him under; and not from any ill-feeling toward the disabled.
            Of course, the fact that there is a council election in Mr Brewers constituency in May, could not have been part of his thinking when delivering his apology. If he had resigned following his comments, then his apology would have been far more convincing; but this he refuses to do. Which tells us that the apology has been made in order to save his political skin in next May’s council elections.
            Manufactured sincerity is an art form best practiced by politicians of whatever level of governance. Ms Court was right to report this councillor’s comments. For there is something about what Mr Brewer said, that he believes, in the recesses of his mind to be true; and allowed it to emerge under stress.
            I have no love of political correctness; it is an insidious feature of the modern age. But Mr Brewers un-politically correct comments on the disabled could only resonate with Nazi Germany: and the embattled Cornish councillor, judging by his photograph, is old enough to remember the gassing of the mentally disabled. But even Hitler never  sought our councillors solution to the physically disabled – especially the hundreds of thousands of German soldiers who returned home with disabilities.
            Who knows, Mr Brewer could find himself half paralysed by a stroke; or his loved ones suffering a physical disability brought about by an accident at work. His wife, if he is married, could fall victim to Alzheimer’s.  None of these different scenarios would I wish upon Mr Brewer or his family; but if, sadly, he or his family fell afoul of such tragedies, then surely he would want them to receive the very best in medical care and support, irrespective of cost.

I MYSELF  HAVE COST the taxpayer thousands of pounds in welfare and medical payments. I have a condition called Ankylosing Spondylitis (AS). It is a form of arthritis that effects every joint in the body, and is an hereditary condition. My neck and spine have been left rigid; each of my vertebra have become fused together; resulting in a curvature of the spine that leaves me looking at the ground and finding myself, almost on a daily basis, bumping into people. My pain is controlled by daily doses of up to eight Co-codamol and three Tramadol. I was once also prescribed anti-inflammatory drugs until they gave me a duodenal, as well as a gastric ulcer.
            I mention this, not for pity sake, but to remind councillor Brewer that when he suggests that those like myself should be put down to save taxpayers money; his prescriptions are no better than those formulated in Nazi Germany.
            Now I know that Mr Brewer is no Nazi; but he does believe in priorities, as does any politician in an age of austerity. But it puzzles me why the disabled are so high up on his list of priority. I fear that the councillor has his own priorities which he wishes to protect…but the disabled, despite his professed life-time support for them, are not, it seems, on his radar.

MR BREWER MUST RESIGN in order to verify the sincerity of his comments on BBC Cornwall. He must prove to the electorate that his apology is nothing more than a political tactic delivered to protect his seat on the council in the coming council elections. His refusal to resign only exacerbates the distrust and undermine the worthiness of his apology. Mr Brewer must resign; not for politically correct reasons; for if this was the case I would speak in his favour; but this has not been the case. Resignation would validate Mr Brewer’s apology and make it all the more convincing.
            However, without it, Mr Brewer’s apology will be seen cynically as an attempt to hold on to office, which he may well do. He may continue as a councillor in Cornwall after the May council elections; but he will only have the support of his paltry voters; for no-one else in the whole country will consider him an honourable man. Only by standing down can Mr Brewer’s honour remain intact. For it was a nasty observation he made against the most vulnerable of this country’s citizens.
            Disability comes in many forms. Like myself through an heredity condition; or through life’s experiences, as we have seen on the battle front in Afghanistan. Unfortunately human beings are never spared physical disability. So perhaps, like the Nazis, Mr Brewer had mental disabilities in mind when he made his dullard and pudden-head comments. If so, such stupidity in itself should forfeit his place on any democratic governing body.
            Mr Brewer unravelled his belief to Theresa Court in a fit of pique following a council meeting. But it was an inner belief that he allowed to surface. He believed in what he said and it slipped out. He was, like myself, tired of playing the politically correct role. If so, he would have had far better targets to aim at than the disabled.
            There are far greater demands on local government spending than the disabled. The flow of immigrants into the country, for instance, have proved a greater cost to local councils than the indigenous disabled: and this situation will only get worse, when, next January, the European Union allows Romanians and Bulgarians to have free excess to the UK, putting ever greater pressure on council spending.
            So Mr Brewer had better look further afield than the disabled to find his very own Final Solution. Immigration has proven to have provided the greatest pressure on public spending – not the disabled: and the pressure is set to increase next January when Romanian and Bulgarian citizens are to be given access to the whole of Europe.