Abolishing Stamp Duty

Why stop at the first £250,000? Surely there must be a better way of raising government revenue than taxing mobility and aspiration ? People move to go to better jobs, or jobs at all, to live in a better area, to enjoy a bigger house or, in the case of some, a smaller house. Why can't the state leave us all alone to arrange our living quarters to suit our taste or needs without trying to profit from us? They can leave me to arrange my housing as I choose and I will not trouble them for free open heart surgery.

Blowing Trumpets

Let the bright Seraphim in burning row,
in burning, burning row,
their loud, uplifted angel trumpets blow,
their loud, uplifted angel trumpets blow,
their loud, their loud, uplifted angel trumpets blow

Let the Cherubic host, in tuneful choirs,
touch their immortal harps with golden wires,

to thank all of you who voted Angels 234 in the top 500 British political blogs.

And my father whose working class conservatism, otherwise known as common sense, is often echoed here.

11th New Labour New Dawn Party Congress

The party Congress in September 2007 can be viewed as a midpoint in the development of New Labour New Dawn policy and programs. The highlight of the Conference was the Leader’s Address which lasted for over an hour and was preceded and punctuated by outbursts of spontaneous applause by delegates and cadres. New Labour New Dawn Leader Brown assured the Congress that most of the social and economic goals announced at the previous Congress had been reached; however, the absence of full quotas on all efforts to improve the working and living conditions of the population, particularly the new cadres from comradely regimes, proved to be a source of concern. NLND sought to redress these issues by announcing a specific program to increase living standards and build for a better future for all now living in Britain. The Congress applauded as the Leader also highlighted the fact that Britain had achieved ever-greater international recognition in the intervening years. Britain's growing involvement in both the European economic system and the global economy reflected its new international status. This international status and the country's improved diplomatic and political standing were the major areas stressed by this Congress as emphasized in an outstanding 7 minutes declaratory exhortation by Minister Miliband. The Party Congress also served as a forum for examining the future challenges facing the NLND party in foreign as well as domestic policy. On the foreign policy front, major events were speeches which expressed in varying ways ideological differences with the United States. At the same time, although allowing different views to be heard, the NLND Party rejected many of these criticisms in the light of its effort to maintain the special relationship with the United States emphasized by Leader Brown. Another major point of emphasis at the Congress was the issue of inter- European federation. From the British side, the benefits were mixed. The British regime considered economic benefits as a major advantage, but the Party viewed with misgivings the rapid increase in travel by Europeans to Britain. Additional problems growing out of the expanding relationship with Europe included conflict between Brussels and London on the rights and privileges of Europeans in Britain; the social unrest generated by the "two-currency" system, in which British citizens who possessed Euros were given the privilege of purchasing scarce luxury goods; and the ongoing arguments over the issue of separate citizenship and rights for the British and European states, which the NLND regime proclaimed but which the European government refused to recognize.
During the Congress, the NLND Party also responded to some of the public excitement and unrest that had emerged in the aftermath of the signing of the new European Constitution, and the human rights documents issued at the meetings of the Conference on a new Constitution for Europe. Congress recognized that before it was convened, the NLND Party had conducted a "People's Discussion" in order openly to air public concerns related to Britain's responsibility in honouring the final document of the Lisbon conference.

The 11th New Labour New Dawn Congress closed with a rousing rendition of ‘The Red Flag’ sung by cadres, delegates and regime members.

No Election

The Leader does not do elections. The Leader does unopposed assumption of office, appointment by controlled bodies, concentration of power in safe hands (mostly his own), and a politics of draining democratic institutions of their authority and, where appropriate, their funding, into parallel governmental and quasi-governmental decision-takers defined as stakeholders, citizens' forums, providers and clients.

The Long March through the institutions is completed and there are three parliamentary terms for the consolidation of the systemic re-ordering of the body politic begun in 1997.
We have watched the dismantling of all fashions of personal and direct protest - foolish those who throw themselves against the forces of law and order now interposed between the people and their rulers.
We have watched as the powers and capacities of the other parts of our constitution have been splintered into sectors controllable by the ruling junta so that while ostensibly carrying out their primary purpose their deep, intertwined functions, each acting and reacting with the others to form the checks and balances upon the control of power within our state, are forever undone - a parliament so cowed by whipping, so hidebound by rule and precedent, so rarely sitting, so vulnerable to executive order, it cannot act; a judiciary beheaded and divided, and excluded from the Upper House, (though the judges may write to the parliament they may no longer address), that has lost control of its own appointment and formation; and with the loss of its single, authoritative voice, has lost, too, the capacity to form and mould our laws through interpretation and extension, or represent the rule of law in the other orders of our constitution; the office of head of state deprived of the private paths of power that have been blocked and broken by this regime, which enabled the Head of State to advise and warn and, at times, deny, with the Privy Council, the hereditary lords (whose roots were literally in the country), the Lord Chancellor, despoiled and downgraded .

All this and, less formal but as crucial, the destruction of a disinterested home civil service loyal to country and governance, replaced by party political administrators loyal to partial ideology and self interest; a military starved of funds then sent to fight in situations of outstanding danger and dubious legal or political propriety, to be rewarded with responsibility for goals and political choices that changed as the soldiers died ; and a church assaulted and defeated by demands that morality should reflect political requirement, so that now the regime speaks and rules even on the most private aspects of individual and family life; the centres of learning and research, and in this the schools too should be included, subjected to constant interference in the name of egalitarianism: there is no egalitarianism in intellectual achievement and it is a confusion of thought to equate deprivation with capacity.

All this needs to be bedded down, fixed as the new politics, and cheap substitutes must be provided for what we have lost. The democratic ladder used to take positions of power must be broken down so that the permanence of this seizure of power by democratic means is ensured, but democratic means are denied to all others.

The Scottish people seized their chance in their last general election and, despite the London regime's best poll-rigging efforts, ousted them; it is hard to believe we will get the same chance.

J. Milton Hayes Speaks Out On the Leader

Nick Drew said...

Oh, well if you insist !!

(warning: strong language, strong sentiments, and mild peril)

There’s a one-eyed yellow Scotsman of a dour and sullen hue
There’s a stench of pious bullshit all around
There’s a broken-hearted woman dreams of socialism true
And the yellow Scot forever lets her down

He was known as Red McBroon, and he made the Party swoon
Though his cowardice had long begun to smell
But for all he was a wanker he was feted by the bankers
And Polly Toynbee smiled on him as well

He’d been stringing her along with his socialism strong
She’d swallowed all he put into her head
When she judged Blair’s time was short, she said Broon had her support
Provided he would prove himself True Red

He wrote to ask what promise she would like from Red McBroon
They met for lunch as many times before
And fervently she told him then that nothing else would do
But his vote against Blair’s mad Iraqi war

On the night of the debate, Red McBroon was in a state,
His followers could bring mad Tony down
But he’d never in his life had the balls to wield the knife
For he knew the wielder never wears the crown

When it came to the division, courage gave way to ambition
And his scruples failed as surely as his balls
When she heard them read the vote, fury welled up in her throat
And ‘betrayal!’ was her cry around the halls

Now Hell it hath no fury like a jilted Polly Toynbee
First Blair and now McBroon had sold his soul
As she stomped off in the night, for her op-ed piece to write
She vowed vengeance on the yellow Scots arsehole

There’s a one-eyed yellow Scotsman of a dour and sullen hue
There’s a stench of pious bullshit all around
There’s a broken-hearted woman dreams of socialism true
And the yellow Scot forever lets her down.

(An earlier post on Angels produced this gem which cannot be left to languish in the comments)

Country, State, and Party

Boris Johnson's admirable setting -out of an army's relationship to it's country's political leadership is more than an expression of the disgrace this country's ruling political party is mired in by refusing any recognition of our army's last years in Iraq and Afghanistan, it illustrates the glaring need for a Constitution with a Head of State empowered to defend it wholly separate from and superior to the executive powers operated by the current political regime.

We do not owe our allegiance to the Labour party , we owe it to our country, its beliefs, culture, traditions, and the past actions that are the embodiment of these. The attempts by authoritorian regimes to identify party with country, to divert emotion associated with patriotism to support offered to political power groups , and the results of these , are in no need of rehearsal.

Where is our Constitution, where are our Judges who allowed the abolition of the Lord Chancellorship, and where is our Head of State?

Courage and the Leader

The Prime Minister of the Westminster parliament, called on to form an administration by an octogenarian, hereditary head of state after being imposed on his own pary without election in any part of its electoral college, and sitting for a seat in a country that has its own parliament (and that led by a different party that has defeated 'Labour' at their last general elections) may choose to call a general election.

Not: feels bound by every idea of constitutional and democratic decency to call a general election so that he might cease to be the only wholly unelected, indeed imposed, prime minister in the democratic, advanced free world. Not: feels bound to obtain assent to the imposition of a high tax, grossly redistributive (and that does not mean in favour of the poor, they just have redistribution among themselves), civil-liberties abolishing, constitution-wrecking, financially laughable, economically incompetent, nomenklatura-corrupted state whose like was last seen under Erich Honecker. Not: in honour acknowledges that ratification of the new European Constitution must be at the heart of the general election.

Go on, you've paid the bribes, don't you trust the people?

You can do it Brown, all it takes is the courage to ask us.

Not wearing a vest

HG has bronchitis and won't be posting or putting through comments until she's up and about again.

the IT consultant

Collectivisation and Ownership

The collectivisation of liabilities rather than assets, and their redistribution to the workers, is perverse for the party of organized labour. Even Mussolini's IRI and IMI took the ownership of what was propped up by by the corporatist state.

What other perversities might yet be demonstrated by the 'Labour' Leader and his regime?

To Big To Fail?

Poland 1982

Bank of Credit and Commerce International 1991

Mexico 1994

Long-Term Capital Management 1998

The Russian Federation 1998

Argentina 2002

Enron 2002

Northern Rock 2007

United States 2009 ?

Will the European Union Veto UK State Support for Northern Rock?

'...rush to withdraw before the European Union vetoes depositors support by the state on the ground of state aid to national companies being forbidden. They are slow, probably deliberately slow this time, but pretty strict about it..'

King of King's

The only reason why the governor of the Bank of England has stayed in post must be a proper and mindful sense of his duty to remain until this regime has finished its dirty work destroying the long term interests of the British economy. Had he resigned in the face of the behaviour of the Westminster prime minister Brown and his puppy dog Chancellor the fat would truly have been in the fire immediately. As it is some pretence of the proper conduct of an economic and financial policy can be kept up and there remains some hope that meltdown can be avoided.

A very fine economist indeed, Mervyn King is now further distinguished for speaking the truth about moral hazard and the undertaking of unnecessary risk which has been accompanied by the greed of those who pursued their own interest (and bonus) to extremis. He is now bearing the opprobrium of political choices made by those answerable to no-one, the Westminster Labour party Executive, presumably because he subscribes to that old-fashioned notion of political duty and public service that Brown wouldn't recognize if it bit him in the bum.

Not that King needs Angels to defend him.

Never Mind Northern Rock

The Bank of England is unlikely to hold current interest rates; it will lower them, it shouldn't but it isn't master in its own house and will meet the Brown regime's requirements. The European Central Bank will raise rates to do its central job of containing inflationary pressures, the job the Bank of England can no longer do now it is no longer an independent central bank.

If you are in sterling, get out.

The Independence of the Bank of England

Mervyn King was savagely over-ruled by the Westminster prime minister and First Lord of the Treasury Brown in the current systemic crisis whose iceberg -tip is Northern Rock.

As the Governor of the Bank tried to stand against moral hazard, inflationary spread of the results of unnecessarily acquired risk, and market-warping interference from political agendas, the Labour regime required the Bank of England to underwrite 10 years of Brown's personal mismanagement of the British economy.

We will all contribute to paying the depositors of Northern Rock their savings. We will pay a higher and longer-running debt in the impoverishment of all our lives by the uncomprehending refusal of these peripheral socialists and their hangers- on to accept that their utopia was a realised nightmare overthrown by its own long -sedated victims, not an ideological dream's subversion by the economic efficiencies imposed by the capitalist world.

The Bank of England is not independent and the best service its wholly proper and estimable Governor can offer now is to underline its subservience to the Brown regime and resign.

A National Planning Framework for England

Controversial new centralised planning powers introduced by Labour and the Liberal Democrats will not be used by the Scottish government to hijack decisions from local authorities, Scottish Finance Secretary John Swinney has declared.

Apart from the "relatively few in number ....projects which are of genuine national strategic significance ...We do not intend to use the National Planning Framework to take decisions that are properly the preserve of local government."

Five- year planning began in the Soviet Union in 1928 and ended in the 1980s with the collapse of the soviet-type system. In the 1960s these plans were imitated by forms of indicative planning, in France particularly, the UK, and in other market economies with large state sectors. They were not compulsory for the private sector and were largely ignored and replaced by ordinary economic policy, further over -ridden by the requirements of the day to day management of the economy.

Since 2000 there has been a consistent determination to put into effect a National Planning Framework for England (after a preliminary report from Manchester University in that year), fitted onto the various unelected Regional Authorities into which England is divided, and projected over the next five decades; Wales and northern Ireland have their own Planning Framework.

Resurrecting obsolete national economic planning goes against the grain of a globalised market economy, is inefficient because it can only interfere by constraint, acting as a straitjacket on private enterprise and hindering economic adjustment processes in the market, is a way of bullying local government authorities, and is (though do they care?), wholly undemocratic.

The Westminster Labour regime is reinventing the (socialist) wheel.

Remaining in the European Union is not for Westminster Political Elites to Choose

“What the British want is an over-arching clause that states that the European Court of Justice has no jurisdiction over common foreign and security policy.”

To demand '... clarification on the place of foreign policy and common security policy in the future treaty, asking for guarantees about the independence of British diplomacy, particularly concerning the authority of the European Court of Justice in this area.”, does not mean anything other than confirming that the United Kingdom opts out of a European-wide foreign policy. But this opt-out does not include an opting out of a requested judicial review of a member-state's actions of any kind, or or an opting-out of means of redress for arbitrary state actions outside of , or transgressing, Union-wide constitutional safeguards generally applicable to all member-states.

A Westminster government spokesman in Brussels insisted that the bilateral talks between British and European Commission lawyers were part of the normal process of negotiating the fine print of a treaty. He said: “We secured all of our red lines in June. Lawyers are now turning that agreement into a treaty text and the UK will ensure that all its red lines are fully respected.” But the UK is in no position to draw lines on everything the EU can do , while it remains a member-state.

The crux of the misfit between the European Union and the the regime at Westminster is exemplified in the famous 'red lines'; while the UK can opt out of anything fom the currency to conditions of employment, to civil rights, to war-mongering, it cannot undo the relations between the citizens of the other member-states and their own constitutional systems and the relations of both the member-states and their individual citizens to the powers of the European Union, which powers are closely set out and regulated, with clear routes to means of review and redress.

This clarity of relations, precision on rights, duties, claims, liberties and redress, is precisely what the Labour regime of the last 10 years has sought to dismantle within the United Kingdom under guise of 'security' and 'ant-terror' measures; as UK individuals we can be arrested under an enormous range of suspicions, DNAed , held for weeks without being brought before a magistrate in a publicly accessible hearing, interned, we are watched by remote camera systems, required to explain our presence, denied access to ostensibly public places, our rights of assembly are removed, and there is little scope for questioning the arbitrary use of authority conferred on all kinds of state bodies and their officials, under enabling acts that are scrutinised only in the most general outlines of the powers being taken, by a wholly controlled legislature. We cannot initiate legislation, and we cannot abrogate laws and legal instruments acting as such. Redress for abuse of power is immensely difficult if not impossible to obtain.

And if the other citizens of Europe were asked to put up with all of this, they would point at their constitutionally enshrined rights and laugh. The Westminster Labour regime cannot have 'red lines' over the democractic, institutional, constitutional and legal expressions of civic governance and politics of other member-states of the EU, or the EU itself.

Just as a Spanish investigative magistrate was free to seek the extradition of Pinochet from England to answer charges on the torture and murder of Spanish citizens, so all citizens, as well as state officers, of member- states of the EU can initiate actions against those, private or state, whose choices offend their rights and obligations under European Union rule.

The wholesale wrecking by the Labour regime over the last decade of many centuries of organic adaptation to changing times and expectations expressed through a jigsaw of interlocking laws, declarations, practices, and understandings that typified the English Constitution, could put the United Kingdom's membership of the European Union to serious question and judicial challenge. It is now clearly very seriously at odds with some of the fundamental and founding principles of the Union.

V Day Backlash

Outrage from the professional politicians and the left wing intellectuals and the right wing intellectuals and the opinion formers and the media commentors and just about everybody except the people, who have begun the fight back. Now the perniciousness of the internet can be understood they shriek, bloggers and risible internet groups getting above themselves with their instant opinions and their comments on the serious professional undertakings of government and administration.

Do click on the Beppe Grillo link - it's all in English and there are some wonderful photos, and revelatory quotes from party leaders and party fakes.

Bloggers forming electoral lists and introducing laws and organising abrogation of unacceptable legislation and naming the criminals and frauds infesting democracy? Something will have to be done about the pestilential constitution and the irresponsible self publicity these people are giving themselves, and their forming into groups and cliques and factions and voting fronts!

(a literal translation of vaffanculo is 'up yours' not what many mistranslate it as).

Vaffanculo Day

In glorious sunshine, in magnificent piazzas at the centres of cities the length and breadth of Italy, in their hundreds and hundreds of thousands, the people signed up to tell their 'democratic' representatives what is and is not acceptable in the administration of the country, from the Senate to the lowliest village comune.

Three short clear demands: no convicted criminals in Parliament; no re- election after serving two terms ; direct mass election of candidates for Parliament instead of lists chosen by party leaderships.

In Florence's piazza della Repubblica we were signing at the rate of 1000 an hour, with police and fire officers in uniform signing along with the rest; in Naples so great was the crowd of signatories in the two main squares, (so appropriately named piazza del Plebiscito) that thousands of fresh forms had to be run off; in Bologna's piazza Maggiore and the interconnected piazza del Nettuno an immense crowd cheered Beppe Grillo, one of the most famous of actors and stand-up comics whose blog is the best in Italy, as he presented 'a proposal for a people's law' and declared that the signatures were already enough.

Enough is what everybody has had: enough of being ignored, enough of having parties that represent none of the aspirations of the voters; enough of criminals and mafiosi and the underbelly of grey governance; enough of paying and not receiving as incredible sums are siphoned off into party coffers and placemen jobs; enough of being told and expected to do as.

One small group of fools raised a red flag in the Bologna meeting. Grillo demanded its immediate lowering. No more of that either.

Vaffanculo.

Unnatural Bedfellows

Gordon Brown consorts with power elites and client interest groups wholly inappropriate for a Leader of the Labour party.

The organized denial of any expression of choice in the selection of the Leader in every section of the Labour party's electoral college was oppressive yet illuminating. Voting had to be avoided for:
Who in the trades union sector would support the person responsible for the 10% and less taxation rate levied on some of the richest in the country? The person responsible for giving away control of monetary policy and boasting of it? The person responsible for taxing working people to the point that they have living standards no better than those supported, work -free, from the confiscations of almost half of working people's earnings? The person who constructs morally hazardous rat runs baited with means-tested benefits that distort the lives and hopes of millions? And the person who boasts that membership of the European Union will be stripped of beneficial effect for working people in the UK.

Who, in the constituency party sector, would vote for the person whose infiltration of disciplined Brown faction apparatchiks into every constituency, supported if necessary by influxes of 'affiliated' Union and Co-operative cadres, ensures that parliamentary seats are available for his henchmen, and that all candidates for the Westminster parliament conform to Brown faction parameters? The person responsible for removing all access to choice of issues to be considered at Labour conferences? The person who initiates non-Party 'citizens juries ' in the place of local Party meetings, discussion, and transmission of views and recommendations?

Who, in the parliamentary Labour party, would vote for a person sitting for a Scottish seat, when Scotland has its own parliament and Government, and represent ing no-one in England? For the person who bears personal and petty overpowering grudges against colleagues who disagree? The person recognized as 'uncollegiate' by a fellow senior minister? The person outed as a 'Stalinist control freak' by a senior permanent administrator? The person who has wrecked policy formulation over and over again by setting up private advisory groups and engaging in last minute inputs as other major ministries tried to steer a sensible course for the governance of the country? The person without parliamentary courtesy or even personal grace.

First suborned under Blair by the chance of holding of office after so many years, now gelded under Brown to democratic impotence, the Labour party will not serve any further political purpose and the voters it once provided from commitment to beliefs and hopes in a fair and safe and co-operative world are now merely bought and paid for.

So who are those who profit from Brown and his regime and sustain his claims to high office ? The very rich enjoying the most benign of tax regimes; the beneficiaries of an almost unregulated financial arena; the great landowners reaping EU subsidies; the profiteers from PFI 'initiatives'; the apparatchiks and placemen benefitting from tax-funded payouts and from democratically- unregulated authority, and their counterparts in the UK allocations within the European Union bureaucracies; the recipients of tax-funded state welfare - profiting from redistribution amongst the relatively poor.

And the self-righteous, the opinionated do-gooders, the class warriors from other decades, the loathers of our various decent cultures asserting values that are equally unacceptable to all of them , the universities run now by business managers with an agenda, the researchers encouraged and funded to research into abomination, off the wall and off their moral heads, the young old, claiming to be retired and entitled; the nomenklatura ensconced in appointed bodies throughout the country draining power and resources from locally elected governance; the international warmongers profiting in Iraq, Afghanistan, parts of Africa, and gazing hungrily at Iran.

Unnatural bedfellows of any real Labour leader.

Defeating Divide and Rule Socialism

Surveying the wreckage of our constitution strewn across the landscape of this Labour-run political decade the understanding that it cannot be reconstituted comes home.

The existential imperative for the Labour junta and party to remain within the European Union ensures that no altered relationship between the UK and the EU can be expected. The ratification of the new Constitutional Treaty will be driven through, for ratification is an act within the powers of the Crown, ie., the governing regime's Executive, and all we are looking at in resistance to, and acceptance of, referendums, or parliamentary debate, is the window dressing.

Only by remaining within the European Union can Labour prevent Scotland's realignment of the United Kingdom's federal relations, if it is true that Scotland sees independence with European Union membership as the destination of its process of devolution. If Scotland opts for the Norwegian model of relations with the European Union, then the Labour regime can use the force of many other EU member states' opposition to encouragement of secessionist regions to restrain Scotland.

The European Union is essentially a federation of the regions, with power devolved to the lowest competent level and and only residual powers operated at federal level. Accepting this (which is not without advantage in correcting the improper level of centralization of power in the UK), then we could ask: how might the United Kingdom organize regions to reflect our history and regional cultural and economic unities, so that the continued centralization of power in the hands of an undemocratic political elite camouflaged by ostensible regionalisation like that currently in place, is avoided?

The separate nations of Scotland and Wales could be joined by Cornwall, Wessex, the Ridings of Yorkshire, Northumberland and the Borders, the ancient territories of the Iceni, (since Roman times recognised as a civitas of these islands), Lancashire, the Marches, together with other city states to join London - Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds...

Properly elected institutions of governance will drain authoritarian Labour of its central control, as Scotland has shown us. And attempts to retain central power would be undermined by the written constitutional arrangments and the practices of regional autonomy obtaining within Europe.

Labour's continued existence requires that it is European but with the United Kingdom federation frozen forever , deformed into irrelevant sectors, like a country defeated in war .

We need to embrace the advantages of Europe for local democratic responsiveness, the preservation and re-creation of whole culturally identified swathes of our country in the way we wish them to be and to be administered; and the destruction of the Labour Project as complete as their Project has been destructive of our past.

We need to be on the real battlefield, not the field that Labour, and its divide and rule socialism, chooses.

Dealing with Brown Stuff

'"Strengthening health systems means addressing key constraints related to health worker staffing [and] infrastructure."' Joint statement as Brown launches plan to save the world.

Funny that in the 19th century it was the provision of clean water, drains, and sewage systems that is widely recognised as the key factor in increasing life expectancy; no-one ever mentions 'key constraints on health worker staffing' , though the contribution of the navvies in building the tunnels and things is recognized. Bet the navvies never thought of themselves as health workers.

Are you on the dnA List?

The dysfunctional Home Office, so famously found unfit for purpose under the current regime, has announced that Labour has no plans to introduce a universal compulsory or voluntary national DNA base.

That will be because it's well past the planning stage, it's up and running with more than 5%of the population trapped on an inappellable listing garnered, amongst other sources, from those merely accused of misdemeanour, never mind crimes.

It may be that Labour hasn't been able to lay its hands on the universe yet either.

Dissolving the Union and the Democratic Deficit

The defeat of the Labour party in Scotland , even after now- demonstrated banana republic levels of vote-rigging and electoral adjustment, has led to typically Labour undemocratic behaviour in imposing Douglas Alexander's sister as the Scottish opposition Labour leader in Scotland's parliament. There has been one of Gordon Brown's favourite opinion 'polls' conducted that purports to show that only around half of Scottish voters want to separate from the union with England and Wales. Ranks of employers in Scotland have been rounded up to issue warning statements about the effects on employment and investment if England and Wales are cut loose. Newspaper articles are being planted objecting to the very language of governance being used by Scotland's Government. The Scottish office in London, far from being wound down as Scotland's Government moves to set up its own civil service and permanent administration, is being beefed up.

The horrified gaze of the United Kingdom Labour executive in power in London has turned on the devolution settlement with Scotland and realised that it is so designed as to provide independence now that the Governmment of Scotland is no longer made up of a supine Labour party Scottish subgroup but, instead, of a successful and popular administration pursuing the interests of Scotland and its people.

The Labour party without Scotland is dead in the water : its leader illegitimately claiming to represent the interests of the English people while sitting in the Westminster parliament at all only because of votes from a Scottish constituency ; its majority sustained by Scottish constituency representatives, already with their own parliament in their own country, whipped into voting on matters wholly outside of the concerns of their own electors and standing out like sore thumbs as they do it, a constant reminder to the electorate of England of the lack of democracy in our own parliament; with the worst of all of them, the Scottish representative who is Speaker of England's Parliament a crawling , Scottish Labour, lickspittle, and a man of notable stupidity being the person whom Labour has thought to use to quieten English dissent to all of this with a Speaker's Conference. England does not need a Scottish Labour Speaker nominated to contain dissent.

Labour's ruling junta in London, led by unelected Labour leader Brown, is trying to provoke the Scottish Government with aggressive claims that oil and gas reserves are always to remain within London control.

But it is not over oil and gas revenues (and more importantly oil and gas reserves and their future development and management), that the steady advance of Scotland's restructuring of its relations with England and Wales is concerned. Once Scotland's Government is in full charge of the powers already available to it, allocation of oil and gas fields and production management is well-governed by contract and treaty, and dispute will be settled in the courts, not by politicians and their parties' interest.

The real and glaring truth is that the Scottish prime minister, First Minister Salmond and the Scottish Government are acting now , properly and effectively, as representatives of the people of Scotland; and the people of England want the same democratic accountability and control over English government for themselves.

Without the Union Labour is finished and exposed as the authoritarian regime it has always been, so that Scotland's advance into its own governance is part and parcel of our own advance into self determination and democratic answerability under an English parliament.

Democracy Denied

More than 140,000 ballots cast on 3 May for the Scottish Parliament and
tens of thousands of ballots cast for the local authority elections, held on the same day, were rejected without any human adjudication.

Scottish prime minister First Minister Alex Salmond stated, "I was under the impression - until this revelation - that the ballots that were rejected were actually seen by the election agents as part of the process," but the BBC reports that in some contests, more than half of all the "spoilt" ballots were not offered for the electoral returning officers and agents to consider; voting machines were set to auto-adjudicate.

Douglas Alexander was deeply involved in the organisation of the Scottish elections from the Labour executive in London; his sister has just been returned (with no opposition, as was Gordon Brown in the UK Labour leadership 'elections') to the leadership of Labour in Scotland.

Even if you manage to get a vote at all, which is sedulously denied within the Labour party to every one of its members, votes cast, more than 140,000 of them in a small electorate, will be ruled out without any indication even of their existence by voting machines and procedures installed under Labour surveillance.

October election anyone? You can vote as early and as often as you like.

Hunter

Electrical Hum

Here is an Amnesty spokesman commenting on the issue of taser guns to policemen for use in situations of threat even if threateners are unarmed:
"You need trained firearms officers who not only know how to fire a Taser but know when to fire a Taser.

"These are potentially very dangerous weapons. Firearms officers undergo continuous training. I understand they undergo training for real life situations.

"And they undergo repeated training every month to keep them up to date. What we don't know is exactly what the nature of the training is that non-firearms officers will receive.

"And we're concerned that it won't be up to the same standard."

That'll be the standard for shooting electricians on their way to work half a dozen times in the head at close range.


50,000 volt shocks delivered for each trigger pull; I wonder how many goes you get before you have to plug it in for recharging?

Furthermore, it is reported in today's papers that the Defence Scientific Advisory Council medical committee, made up of 'independent' scientists and doctors, was asked to particularly assess the dangers of receiving 50,000 volt shocks by children and, are they insane?, pregnant women. To which enquiries this committee of quangoistas actually replied with an assessment of the risks.

Just doing their job.