Official: New Britain Now Plutocracy
For anyone who thought that maybe they could exercise their democratic right to vote at the next election and perhaps change the political landscape of New Britain, it is now too late.
New Britain, home of the mother of all parliaments, has now ceded control of this once proud land to the rich arriviste tradesmen. Money is now firmly in control and the cowards and quislings of government are going to be suckered, screwed and squandered by the rich until Britain well and truly learns to do as it is told by those in positions of real power.
We had the recent spectacle of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, not only being heckled and barracked at a City dinner, but also being ordered by Digby Jones (one of Gordon Brown’s handpicked gems in his government of none of the talents) and his rich chums to stop being idiotic enough to think he could impose taxes on the rich.
Needless to say, Darling of the Treasury did as he was told double quick, without even a pretence of standing up to the unacceptable face of capitalism. After all, he had to appear to be very relaxed about people becoming stinking rich, even if the stink was from being shat upon from a great height.
Now we have the bizarre and ludicrous prospect of a motor car manufacturer mounting a legal challenge against Ken Livingstone’s decision to raise the London congestion charge from £8 to £25 for the highest-polluting vehicles.
No doubt they will also make a challenge against the prohibition of driving cars on Ministry of Defence land when exercises with live munitions are taking place. After all, why on earth should the rich be prevented from doing anything they want?
Not, you will note, the drivers of the cars, from whose pockets the payment of the charge will come, but the car maker. Porsche, makers of fast cars and a van-like behemoth to satisfy the demanding requirements of the Chelsea tractor set do not want their rich clients having to dip into their pockets for anything other than the lovely, luxurious things in life. They should not have to taint their delicate little purses with anything as demeaning as having to pay an extra congestion charge, which might lump them with people who drive commercial vehicles and old bangers.
According to The Times Online, this is what a clearly outraged spokesperson for Porsche had to say:
“A massive congestion charge increase is quite simply unjust,” said Andy Goss, managing director of Porsche Cars GB.
“Thousands of car owners driving a huge range of cars will be hit by a disproportionate tax which is clear will have a very limited effect on CO2 emissions.”
Mr Goss claimed that the higher rate of tax on large vehicles will damage London based-businesses and put off rich non-domiciled entrepreneurs from settling in London.
“Successful people from across the world will start to think twice about basing themselves here if they think they are going to be used as cash cows for City Hall,” he said.
“The proposed increase will be bad for London as a whole and will send out the signal that it is not serious about establishing itself as the best place in the world to do business.”
How predictable that anyone who speaks for the rich sees anything which may mean they might have to be parted from any of their money as an ‘injustice’.
About thirty years ago, then then boss of Unilever had to tell a radio interviewer that he had no influence whatsoever on government policy and perhaps there was some truth in it.
More recently, a celebrity starlet said that having haute couture clothes and accessories helped to make similar people recognisable to each other. Obvioulsy, this only means people of similar wealth, as it is not illegal for criminals or psychopaths to have nice things: for some it is de rigeur.
Perhaps this is the secret of the whole affair. Central London must be the country’s biggest free showroom for Porsche cars and perhaps they are scared that orders may dry up if the cars cannot be seen.
After all, as far as people with money go, it is pretty much monkey see, monkey buy.
New Labour: We Will Cure The Sick - All Of Them
John, Chapter 5:
[8] Jesus saith unto him, Rise, take up thy bed, and walk.[9] And immediately the man was made whole, and took up his bed, and walked: and on the same day was the sabbath.
Of course, it was Tony Blair who had the messiah complex and who would happily have sold his grandmother if it meant he could walk on water, but governments love the idea of seeming to occupy the moral high ground, especially if there is money to be made from it.
The problem is, it usually backfires, like when John Major had a vision of “a thousand points of light” and stood on stage pretending to see them before him, as he swept his arm to indicate to the unbelievers that they really did exist.
It all went sour when some clever-dick pointed out that the line in the song was actually: “We’ve got a thousand points of light for the homeless man/ We’ve got a kinder, gentler machine gun hand”.
Still, you cannot blame New Labour in its last, dying days to pull a stunt which it thinks will not be seen as the usual demagogic, incendiary nonsense of an administration in terminal decline.
We are now instructed to see the usual suspects as figures of hate, so that we do not notice the vast, entrenched corruption of the government and its addicted milking of the public purse and its psychological enthraldom to big business. The people we should want to see publicly stoned, according to a government Freud, is now anyone on Incapacity Benefit.
Freud, Freud, Freud - seems familiar. Ah, yes, there was the one who invented psychoanalysis a long time ago. Then there was the one who cooked who became an MP. Then there was the one who was Tony Blair’s right hand man, who has since gone fully over to Mammon and a bank.
Then there is this one - David Freud. Every prime minister may need a Willy. Apparently, every New Labour administration needs a Freud.
This Freud is another banker. Of course, if you wanted someone to look into the lives of ordinary people, your first choice would always be a merchant banker. Quite. Or maybe if your best friends tell you that you have psychological flaws, the idea of having the great grandson of Sigmund Freud lurking around provides some kind of comfort: just in case you have, for instance, some kind of spontaneous and uncontrollable grinning fit.
Anyway, there are signs that this particular government Freud may not be the smartest money-changer in the Square Mile.
Although obviously parroting the idea of all governments that public money is not to be used for the, er, public, but is to be siphoned off for business, he seems to undermine his own logic for doing this. He says that people claiming Incapacity Benefit only need the word of their GPs to confirm their ailment and that this is open to corruption. However, his scheme is to make ill people work and for this, he will use businesses which will be paid vast sums on results. In order to receive payment, the government will just need the word of the business and a cheque will be in the post. No possible chance of corruption there, then.
Just another great big corporate trough with snouts all round because, obviously, it is better to pay business than to pay people.
From The Telegraph:
There has, he [David Freud] believes, been a sea change in Labour’s thinking about the benefits system. “Gordon Brown has now said they’re going to do it,” he says. “Peter Hain [the previous work and pensions secretary] was worried about the Left. Purnell is showing astonishing energy, there is going to be a much more single-minded ferocity.”
Mr Freud’s big idea is that the private sector be put in charge of the long-term unemployed. Companies taking part would receive a huge fee for getting somebody to stay in a job for more than three years but nothing if they fail.
There will be bonuses for hard cases, and no special treatment of disabled people or lone parents with children at school. “There are about 3.1 million people not working, I think we can get about 1.4 million back to work,” Mr Freud says.
Labour MPs and activists will hate the idea of “privatising” the Welfare State but the adviser says: “The system we have at the moment sends 2.64 million people into a form of economic house arrest and encourages them to stay at home and watch daytime TV. We’re doing nothing for these people.”
Of course, another solution would be to ask all MPs who currently employ relatives and friends funded by the public purse to take on an unemployed person currently on Incapacity Benefit instead.
Problem solved overnight at no extra cost.
Credulous Babbling Idiots
The tendency is that you believe what your parents say when you are a small child. You soon learn, however, that they do not really have any more of a clue than you and so start to look for more credible sources of knowledge.
This should be a continuous process in which we do not meekly accept any old drivel which is foisted on us from people who appear to hold positions of authority. If that were true, we would all believe the nonsense spouted by intellectually challenged fantasists like George Bush and Tony Blair as if it had even a remote connection with reality.
One problem is that we can look at precedent and say that the vast thrust of general opinion has been wrong plenty of times before. Before Galileo, we thought the sun revolved around the earth, so there seems to be forever room for crackpots to ponder the mysteries of the world in the hope that they might come up with some enlightened theory which has eluded all the other great thinkers hitherto.
Except, of course, that this is not what happens: they just come up with harebrained ideas which only appeal to other mentalists and nutters, but aided by the fact that the internet acts as a magnet for all these other delusionists to congregate, somewhat in the manner that governments always attract the dross of society to coalesce together.
So, over at The Telegraph, Damian Thompson runs through some of the conspiracy theories regarding 9/11, Creationism and Aids and how credulous people absorb some of this nonsense willy-nilly, as if by osmosis and the fact that it then dilutes real science and real knowledge and leads to people being unable to make rational and intellectually rigorous judgments.
Once the wonder of the internet wore off, we all saw that it is mainly a massive pile of doo-doo and nobody sensible takes it very seriously. It is a bit like the old illusion that financial institutions were run by incredibly clever and honourable people, when we now know they are controlled by psychopaths with a lemming mentality, whose only intellectual ability is doing sums quickly in their head.
The problem, though, is that we get stuff like this, from Damian Thompson’s ‘Counterknowledge: How We Surrendered to Conspiracy Theories, Quack Medicine, Bogus Science and False History’ :
The fingerprints of the alternative medicine lobby are all over the worst British health scare of recent years, in which thousands of parents denied their children the MMR triple vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella following the dissemination of flawed data linking it to autism. In that case, distrust of orthodox medicine increased the danger of a measles epidemic.
But that is nothing compared to the impact of medical counterknowledge in underdeveloped countries. In northern Nigeria, Islamic leaders have issued a fatwa declaring the polio vaccine to be a US conspiracy to sterilise Muslims: polio has returned to the area, and pilgrims have carried it to Mecca and Yemen. In January 2007, the parents of 24,000 children in Pakistan refused to let health workers vaccinate their children because radical mullahs had told them the same idiotic story.
These incidents cannot be dismissed as examples of medieval superstition: these people are not rejecting life-saving vaccines because they reject modern medicine, but because their leaders are spouting Islamic takes on Western conspiracy theories. Counterknowledge, with its ingrained hostility towards a political, intellectual and scientific elite, appeals to anti-American, anti-Western sentiment in the developing world.
My father used to say, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing” and he was speaking from experience. I say, “Never believe what you are told”.
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