The politics of envy

IF THE POLL in yesterday's Mail on Sunday is correct, 60 per cent of the British people are believers in the politics of envy and agree with Ed Balls' intention to raise the tax burden on those who earn over £150,000 to 50 per cent. I bet not many of those 60 per cent have any consideration for the rich. They see them as greedy and selfish, and deserving little sympathy. Yet, how many of that 60 per cent buy a lottery ticket on a Wednesday and Saturday in the hope of becoming what they despise? 

            

            Ed Balls' boast that over five years his tax would raise £15 billion, is ridiculed by all and sundry including  his own Labour supporters. The true estimate is £100 million each year, and in today's Daily Telegraph, twenty business leaders warned of the consequences to the recovery of such an antic.

            

            Ed knows of course that he has introduced this policy for purely political reasons. He must know his claims are nonsense and is pandering to a streak of envy within the British, which has become engrained since the 1960s. Wealth creation is almost despised on the Left, and Ed is pandering to these almost primeval socialist instincts that have caused nothing but misery whenever they have surfaced throughout modern history .

            

            I remember when Dennis Healy, as Labour chancellor, threatened to squeeze the rich until the pips squeak. As with Ed Ball's, Dennis was doing it primarily for political effect. It was red meat to the caged animals at the Labour Party conference, who were red in tooth and claw socialists who would have had Clause IV tattooed on their arms - where ordinary working class men would have had either their mother or the name of some other loved one's.

            

           At one time in the 1970's when Britain was, economically speaking, almost on its knees. Taxing the rich was a popular sport for the Labour Party, and at one point levels of such taxation peaked at 83 per cent[1]; an unbelievable proportion of anyone's income, let alone the rich. This would have left those, who today are in the £150,000 income bracket  with a £25,500 salary, which is about today's average wage.

            

           The Labour Party has always used three historical levers when it comes to managing the economy, tax, spend, and borrow - simples: and under Gordon Brown this formula was used to increase the public sector, whose millions of employees are natural Labour supporters, and could be relied upon at election time.

           

           New Labour under Tony Blair tried to transform businesses' loathing  of the Labour Party as anti-business and anti-enterprise. When in power from 1997 to 2007, he managed to gain the trust of business. The Labour Party did briefly, under his tutelage, become the natural party of government; by winning three general elections.

            

            Now it seems the Party is returning to its true nature; and the economy will suffer once more as a consequence - perhaps fatally so next time.

            

            Ed Balls is, after all, only doing what pre and post Blair Labour governments have always done; dip their hands into people's wallets, and do so as if it were some kind of human right of theirs to so do. Labour are well used to fleecing people of their earnings; and if those serving on today's opposition benches were earning over £150,000, the 50% tax increase would, no doubt, only apply to those over £200,000.

            

            Labour politicians are as ambitious as Tory ones to increase their personal wealth. But the Tories are not hypocrites when it comes to entertaining lobbyists, or finding any other means by which their status as MPs can increase their income. Labour MPs are equally ambitious regarding their own self-interest; being a natural feature of human nature - especially if such natural behaviour encompasses the family. But nevertheless, they remain highly critical of the Tories for behaving as they themselves are all too well prepared to do.

REMOVING HALF THE income from anyone is theft by the state. Yet politicians (as well as, sadly, 60 per cent of the British population) see it as in some way I am yet to understand, as being somehow 'fair'. How can taking half a person's income from him be considered in any way fair. At least a mugger only sates his appetite for easy money on a single purse or wallet.

            

            Modern government on the other hand, is fast resembling the robber barons of old. Today Robin Hood would be on the side of the rich under a Labour government. The state has no right to demand such rates of taxation as Ed Balls is proposing on the most talented in every field of human enterprise. The businessmen and women entrepreneurs; the ambitious of all pursuits; the successful writers and artists; those determined to succeed at every level of society; all seek advancement and wealth free from crippling forms of taxation.

           

             Society progresses via ambition and the unrestricted freedom to use it; but such savage taxes only make ambition  an un-worthwhile endeavour.  What Ed Balls proposes is not some new formula that will clear the deficit by 2020, but one which will ruin the country long before.

           

              Ed Balls cannot be such an idiot, can he? He must know that, given the experience in France of Hollande's 75 per cent tax on his hassled rich; he must surely realises that such a prohibition on wealth creation can only drive away the most ambitious and talented - wealth creators in fact. Some 200,000 French men and women have escaped France to come to the UK, as well as other more receptive European countries to escape the socialist French president's idiocy.

            

              Yet Ed Balls is as determined upon travelling the same path as the French president. I begin to wonder whether socialism is at all sane as a concept set as it is in opposition to human nature. I believe that socialism is a utopian freak of human nature, which the more it is encouraged the greater the misery it will manage to create; and its history validates this. It had a purpose in those decades of the 19^th and early 20^th century when the industrial revolution resembled the wild west, and the commoditisation of human labour, as Marx described it, free from union representation, turned this early industrialised capitalism into a truly abhorrent system that brought misery to millions of working-class people.

            

             Now, Ed Ball's is behaving as if we still live the lives we did then. Socialism served a function during the rise of capitalism, and will do so again if modern capitalism, at any stage, retreats back to its early beginnings.

            

             The 50 per cent tax rate is like a genetic throwback to the 1970s. Ed Balls is finished as a politician, even if his leader does not yet realise it. Ed Balls was Gordon Brown's Grima Wormtongue[2]         who protected his master, but only  in his own self-interest. He was as responsible for the almost ruination of this country as Brown and the bankers. He is not liked in the country, even if his 50 per cent announcement attracted much support.

            

              Ed Ball's is a busted flush in fact. But Ed Milliband is frightened to sack him. Probably because of Ball's support within the unions. The very unions whose block votes made him the leader of the Labour Party. I truly hope that Ed Balls remains where he is, as does, no doubt, David Cameron.

                       

                                                                 

---

[1] Source: Economa

[2] Wormtongue is a reference to Lord of the Rings 

Sex selection - a new focus in the abortion debate

THE INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER is to be congratulated on their exposure of sex selected abortions among Asian communities. This is a practice that most of us knew was happening, a priori, but the Independent has found sound empirical evidence from studying the 2011 census, which suggests that 4,700 female embryo/foetus  have been aborted within such communities; because within such cultures a dowry has to be paid by the family when a daughter marries.

            

            The government had denied that any such evidence existed when, last June, Earl Howe, a minister at the Department of Health (DoH)  insisted that; ‘on sex selection, we have no evidence at all of gender-related abortion in the UK. Concerns were expressed about this in the Press, but analysis has been done that shows the UK birth ratio is within normal limits’.  The DoH never had the evidence because they did not want to find it. Ministers and civil servants knew of such practices, but preferred not to investigate them for fear of offending the Asian communities that practiced such gender related abortions.

            

            The DoH has turned a blind eye, in the same way the police and social services in Rochdale and Oxford did, when young white girls were harvested from the streets by Asian gangs to be abused and raped; and they did it for the same reason.

            

            Socially liberal Britain is seeing a few chickens coming home to roost. Ever since   the 1967 Abortion Act was steered through by the then pre-knighted and peeraged David Steel, the debate about the status of the embryo/foetus  has raged - are they human or just clumps of tissue without any human genus?

            

            In order to pay homage to the rising tide of feminism; it was decided to strip the  embryo/foetus of all human identity, and it continues to be the case today. No wonder our feminists have, along with other contentious practices adopted by our other minority cultures, ignored what should have been a cause-celebre for feminism.

            

            If, on the other hand, some senior Canadian police officer says that women who dress provocatively cannot complain if men are overcome with lust; then the feminists take to the streets en-mass all over the Western world.

           

           At least the feminists are consistent in that they care little about the embryo/foetus  whether male or female. But one would have thought that by selecting the female embryo/foetus for termination on grounds of gender, they would have protested at the attitude held toward women by the Asian communities.

            

            But, also like the DoH, as well as the social workers and constabularies in Rochdale and Oxford; the feminists have also decided to turn a blind eye regarding the Asian communities chauvinistic attitude to women. Compared to the way women are treated in other cultures, particularly, but not exclusively Muslim ones, our white Western feminists are living in an Amazonian paradise regarding the advancement of their sisterhood. 

            

             They are hypocrites all, and their feminist manifestoes, articles, and books, are filled with  so much false piety. They care  little about the sufferings of their gender, if such suffering is confined to ethnic minorities.

BUT BACK TO the issue of abortion. There is another statistic, referred to by Dominic Lawson writing in today's Daily Mail. This concerns the laxity of the 1967 Abortion Act. At the time we were told there would be all sorts of safe guards written into the legislation that put strict limits on the procedure. One being that two doctors must be consulted before an abortion is allowed. But those doctors who opposed, for ethical reasons, any termination, removed themselves, rightly, for reasons of conscience from any practice resulting in abortion.

            

            This meant however, that the embryo/foetus had lost many an ambassador for their cause. Now, of the 200,000 abortions carried out each year, some 50% have been terminated without the need (presented in the 1967 Act as being in its spirit) of any intervention from two doctors. The term used in the Act was, two doctors acting "in good faith" by judging in part the mental condition of the mother. Much it seems was left to faith by a liberal constituency which was, on the whole, secular in its outlook.

            

             David Steel  is now about to experience the world beyond the thin end of the wedge talked of in 1967 and ever since. Many other liberals, from within all the main parties who regard abortion as in some way "progressive", are finally tainted by this inhuman procedure.

            

             The 1967 Abortion Act was neither 'progressive', or in any way to be considered to be a humane response to the back street abortionists that preceded it. Consider just how many writers, musicians, artists, and scientists have been denied the possibility of advancing our civilisation through the application of this foul act. Selfish and self-centred women have, over the decades since 1967 terminated their pregnancies; but for no other reason than using the procedure as another form of contraception.

           

             We were once told that no women chooses lightly to abort her pregnancy. This was, at the time, in 1967, the feminist response to those on the Right who opposed Steel's abortion act - thus came into being this new addition to the various other methods of contraception. Abortion  today  has become as familiar as the seasons to those wishing to rid themselves of an unwanted problem.

            

             There should be in theory, none, or very few abortions taking place. Women have the pill as well as the morning after pill, along with more traditional methods of contraception. Men either have the Catholic method of withdrawal, or the condom. And in extremis being neutered.

            

             We have all these methods of prevention, yet still every year 200,000 abortions take place. If abortion has not become another form of contraception, then let our liberal politicians from all the main parties who supported Steel's abortion act explain to us where we have lost their liberal plot.

           

              Abortion involves the killing of a human embryo/foetus; not a dog's or cat's. The only way the liberal elite would understand this, is if we were to describe the Leonardo Cartoon as the mere embryo/foetus  to the finished master piece; and therefore without significance and could be readily put to the flame. Imagine the outrage at such an abortion of a work of art.

            

             Well I feel the same way about the human embryo/foetus. I am an atheist, but not a secularist. Between 1968 and 2003, six million legal abortions were performed in the UK[1]- while five hundred abortions are being performed each day.

            

             With this rampant nightmare in progress, what the liberal's are concerned with, if at all, is gender selection; not the cruelty and denial of opportunity to either sex brought about by such killings. I say killings because the parameters of the term murder are set by the state, and, the 1967 Abortion Act made abortion legal. So the destruction of human life, under circumstances allowed by the state; is perfectly legal.

            

              It is a good job that in the 17^th and 19^th  centuries, abortion was never rubber stamped by the state. For we may have been left without Shakespeare and Dickens, along with a flurry of artists, authors, engineers, and scientists over the coming centuries that lifted this country up on the world stage - how stupid can our people be?

            

             The wretched Steel has a lot to answer if he believes in a maker. If not, he will have done future mankind a disservice including his own future ancestors by the so-called 'progressive' path he, in his political immaturity, took.

            

             Abortion has limited the cultural blood of the nation. Many great minds in all spheres of human cultural activity have been put to the abortionists knife. Lives which will now never prosper mankind.

           

           

           

             

           

---

[1] According to the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC).

Democracy abuse

‘I think that membership of the EU is absolutely fundamental to British interests and therefore we should be very wary of putting our membership in the hands of a lottery in which you have no idea what factors, completely unrelated to Europe, will affect the outcome of that lottery and therefore affect the fundamental interests for Britain…' Lord Mandelson

MANY AMONG THE Brussels bureaucrats and unelected commissioners there is talk of the post democratic age. What they mean is that democracy has outlived its usefulness. It is a pulpit for populism, a much loathed concept in Europe.

            

            That politicians should have to listen to and obey the wishes of the people through the ballot box is anathema; especially when it comes to the European project of a Greater Europe.

            

             It is truly frightening to listen to  the likes of the unelected Barroso, the president of the European commission, and one-time Maoist who sneers openly at the democratic process with constant references to its courting of 'populism'. He cares not one iota for majority rule because he believes it is based on politicians 'sucking up' to the electorate and promising them things he and his ilk believe go against the interests of a Greater Europe.

           

            He therefore condemns Cameron's meaningless promise to hold an in-out referendum on Europe in 2017 if , that is, he is re-elected; and then only after he sought to negotiate reforms. At least, however, Cameron still believes in democracy, which is more than can be said for Lord Mandelson who warns against allowing any democratic say on our membership of the EU.

            

            To him the issue is far too important to the country to allow the people of the country to have a say. It should be left to the politicians, who understand their nation's interests far better than do the people who elected them. To let the sheep chorus an anti-EU bleat via the ballot box, is, to the likes of the noble Lord, almost medieval. It is time for men of vision to advance European history once more, as happened under Napoleon and Hitler.

            

             We must not fail European greatness for a third time, seems to be what Lord Mandelson is suggesting. Only the Great and the Good can steer Europe's destiny - democracy at best slows things down; and at worst undermines the whole project. The people must step to one side and remain silent. Populism is, in the lexicon of the European family in Brussels, like a dose of the clap which must be treated with an anti-biotic…the noble Lord and the buffoon Barroso being the penicillin.

            

              I would see the likes of Lord Mandelson (and there are thousands more like him guarding the gate of the European project) as enemies of democracy. I would even go further: in their utter contempt for the European electorate they, on this one single issue, can be likened to Stalin and Hitler in the way they treat the will of the people. Both Hitler and Stalin would despise populism, unless it favored their point of view: and I think it is the same with Lord Mandelson and Barroso.

            

             If the British public were, instead of being Eurosceptical, fully supportive of Lord Mandelson's faith in the Greater Europe project; then any objection to the expression of the popular will through any in-out referendum would not be opposed. Indeed, the likes of Lord Mandelson would praise the wisdom of such a popular will. The truth is, that not only in the UK, but throughout the rest of Europe, it's people are wizening up to what a Greater Europe would mean to the nation state; and this is why the Eurocrats, among whom Lord Mandelson is a respected member, are fearful of the popular will of the people -  which is, after all, democracy.

            

            Lord Mandelson sounds like a late 18^th century French aristocrat in his declamation against democracy quoted above.  Of course, like all of his kind, Lord Mandelson uses flowery language to disguise their contempt for the ballot box. He suggests, 'we should be very wary of putting our membership in the hands of a lottery…' The lottery, of course, refers to the ballot box and the will of the people.

            

            Lord Mandelson belongs to this country's  liberal elite that have hegemony over our Kingdom. Like many an authoritarian, he believes in democracy only in as much as it agrees with him. When it no longer does so, it becomes a pestilence: something either to be gotten rid of or ignored, if possible. Sadly for the good Lord, Euroscepticism can no longer be gotten rid of; so ways must be found to ignore it; and the best way is to prevent a referendum taking place.

           

             

           

More bits and pieces

THEY HAVE been described as fools and idiots, by the British press. They are the intrepid adventurers who are willing to put their own lives and those of their children at risk.

            

            The storms that have battered our coasts over the past few months have created a new phenomenon. Young men getting as close to the treacherous conditions to make a video and take photographs of massive waves destroying our sea defences. These weather conditions have so far laid claim to two lives.

            

            Why do they do it. The thrill? The reward? Something is driving this new phenomenon of the digital age, when ordinary young men can play photo journalist, taking risks for the right picture: and what is the right picture?

            

            It is the one the news networks will show, after our amateur snappers send their results via their smart phones to the BBC, ITV, and Sky, as well as the hundreds of other news broadcasters throughout the world.

            

            Our broadcasters are to blame for these acts of stupidity because of their incessant pleading for video and photo's of any newsworthy event; such as a motorway pile-up, or the possibility of a live recording of a plane crashing, and, of course the latest storms. Because of the information technology available to 100 per cent of the population, any newsworthy event will be recorded by someone or other, and the news broadcasters know this, and so make requests for any video or photo that may have been made or taken.

            

             I watch Sky News[1], and whenever a news event occurs the entreaty is made for photos and videos to be downloaded to them by their viewers. The viewers readily oblige, and are now taking unnecessary risks to provide these downloads. How long will it be before the broadcasting companies offer payment for such downloads by the public, in the furtherance of competition?

            

            Those who put themselves in danger, know that given the right image or video, they stand the chance of having their work broadcast all over the world. What greater incentive do such people need? An incentive encouraged by the broadcasters themselves.

            

            The irony of course, is that the very same broadcasters who encourage the stupidity we have witnessed during these storms, are the very same ones who condemn the stupidity alongside the press.

*                      *                      *                      *

IMMIGRATION AS  a topic will not go away, primarily because we have a party leader in this country supported by 80 per cent of the population, when it comes to  the subject of immigration

            

             Nigel Farage has done great damage to David Cameron; and as Ed Miliband's comments on cheap labour from Eastern Europe undermining the British worker shows, he too faces a backlash from Labour voters just as Cameron does. Now each of them are struggling pitifully to re-harvest the voters who have gone over to Ukip.

            

             Milliband has admitted that British workers "will lose out" from the invitation given to Romanian and Bulgarians to come among us, and join the hundred or so other foreign tongues that have been allowed to wag on our streets.

            

             What is happening is that both the main parties, some 16 months before a general election, and just four months before a European one; are trying to flimflam their traditional voters with sympathetic rhetoric, that they hope will bamboozle their core voters once again.

            

             As far as their core voter's are concerned, they will always obey their party leader whatever happens. The core vote within the main parties, have unchallengeable loyalty to their party. They have, through the generations, been addicted to one party or another, until the blind hand of tradition has taken over. Like Manchester United and Manchester City, the core vote comprises the intractable loyalty of  Manchester's soccer fans toward the city's two football clubs.

            

             But now such habits are being challenged by Ukip, and both the main parties are becoming fearful, even for the loyalty of their core voters.

*                      *                      *                      *

BACK TO Nigel Farage. In an interview he gave on Sky to Dermot Murnaghan, he said that parts of Enoch Powell's "rivers of blood" speech were accurate, and he agreed with Powel's sentiments on the way immigration changes communities "beyond recognition".

            

             In his April 1968 speech, he said the indigenous population had found their "homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition.” Many of the indigenous population today would agree fully with this sentiment - it does not make them, or Powell, racist. As Nigel Farage pointed out in his interview: in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, the annual net inflow to the UK was between 30 and 50,000 people. But over the last decade of the 21^st century he points out, there has been a "… net 4 million extra migrants coming to Britain."

            

            There has to be social consequences to such a large intrusion; and we are seeing it with our public services where immigration has become the elephant in the room when discussing the NHS, education, housing, and the welfare state. This was all that Powell was saying, and when he angrily and passionately demanded, "We must all be mad!", he was reflecting the thoughts of many indigenous inhabitants toward their politicians.

            

             For, who today can say our flood of immigration, willingly and ceremoniously encouraged by the last Labour government, was not an act of madness? A government which went out of its way to actively encourage migration to the detriment of the very people who created the Labour Party - the working class; a class which today is seeing their own living standards undermined by cheap immigrant labour from eastern Europe.

           

           

             

---

[1] As I have said Sky is not alone, it is a practice favoured by all broadcasters