4000 Holes in Blackburn Lancashire

Nuclear power generation may or may not appeal to you but it appeals to the Labour government in England. So that's what we're getting (what Labour is getting in return is another question).

Intrinsic to nuclear power generation is nuclear waste disposal. There are two schools of thought:

Do not create nuclear waste (but this is not acceptable to the Labour government or to their nuclear power industry best friends).

If you have created nuclear waste, keep it close, and keep it monitored (this, too, is unacceptable to Labour and its nuclear supporters, for the vitrification of nuclear waste costs profits or even economic viability; and the public display of the other side of the nuclear power coin is bad for business, as well as causing local revolt).

The Third Way is to push it down holes in the ground, preferably where the locals cannot prevent this from being done. Then forget about it. The undesirable consequences - sickness, mutation, disability, death being the most immediate, but there is the over all problem of the blight of any geologically challenged location too - cannot be allowed to stay the march of Progress and Electrification.

It was planned to fill Scottish holes with anything and everything that glows in the dark for aeons. Scotland has developed another kind of power, so Labour can't.

If there are any holes near where you live, and if you are feeling powerless, move.

Marquess of Berkhamstead in the County of Hertford, We Need You!

Representing the Scottish seat of Paisley and Renfrewshire South, the Scottish Minister of Transport for England, Douglas Alexander, bosses the English about in the matter of our rundown rail system, over-taxed (in every sense) road system and generally presides over the difficulties of moving about in England at all.

This man, unelected by and not answerable to a single England elector, also claims that 'After the 2005 General Election, he was given the role of Minister of State for Europe, part of the Foreign Office, with special provision to attend Cabinet. This job was seen as crucial to successfully piloting the referendum on the European Constitution, a significant electoral pledge by Labour. On June 7, 2005, he was made a Member of the Privy Council.' So we know what his orders must have been and how doglike was his faithfulness in their execution.

Alexander is also the fool (or knave) who insisted on a single ballot paper being used in the Scottish elections, against the advice of civil servants and Scottish electoral officers, directly blamed for the invalidating of over 100,000 votes cast. The Labour Executive had thought thus to enhance their vote by a near fraudulent practice, which resulted in a blowback that threw them out of office in their Scottish colony.

The Scottish member of parliament for the Scottish constituency of Kirkaldy and Cowdenbeath, who claims to have qualified to assume the office of Prime Minister of England by virtue of ousting the current Prime Minister from the leadership of the Labour party, intends to advance Alexander's capacities to wreck English governance.

The Duke of Cumberland has been gravely misrepresented.

Straw Man

Prime Minister Blair is abroad; deputy Prime Minister Prescott is in high-level hospital care. The Leader of the House should be running things in their absence. Unfortunately who is really pushing and shoving us all about and wrecking lots of careful inter party work, while bullying 'journalists' is the usual bogey man suspect, Brown. Why is the United Kingdom being treated like these people's play thing?

The Constitution may be unwritten but it is supposed to be there. Let's hope nothing more serious than being at war on two fronts, facing quite bad economic problems, and other chronic situations, doesn't hot up into a crisis before the Prime Minister's victory tour is completed.

Labour Executive Lies

The widespread discussion of encroaching state power over civil liberties is admirable and shows we're not accepting the Labour party Executive's behaviour as reasonable.

The silence, on matters so central to the relationship of individuals and the political authority they cede to government, on the part of the Labour party's Leader in waiting (he cannot be called Leader-elect as he's Leader-imposed) is of Holmesian proportions. We must take it that he likes it all, particularly as none of it applies to Scotland.

Peculiarly distasteful is the revelation of measures, backed up by specialised staff and a 'secure' unit, to detain at will and without review or judicial means of intervention, any person indicated as communicating a threat to public figures.

'Persone in vista', coupled with the infamous 'lei non sa chi sono io' (you don't know who I am) is the hallmark of authoritarian attitudes to those who should be regarded as the givers of authority.

Guevara's understanding that a socialist society could never exist without first a socialist conciousness in man, applies equally to authoritarianism of any kind. The condemnatory response to Labour's behaviour, ranging across the political spectrum from far left to far right and taking in all of us except the minority statist conformists of the Labour cadres, illuminates this:

No-one in the United Kingdom accepts the need for any of the so-called 'terrorism' laws. All recognize that the country is more vulnerable than others to targetting (and whose fault is that?) but just as in the years of the Troubles in Ireland, we will keep or vigilance high, and keep our liberties.

Why are we putting up with this?

England doesn't want Gordon Brown and his Labour MPs sitting for Scottish seats, like him, deciding policy for England in Westminster. Why should it? The Scottish have their own Parliament to make their political choices and have little and spurious claim to involve themselves in ours.

And now it's clear that Scotland doesn't want Labour Scottish MPs sitting for Scottish seats making political choices for Scotland either.

So Scottish Labour MPs sitting for Scottish seats who are members of the Westminster Parliament are going to be making political choices for the English electorate who have not voted for them, and for the Scottish electorate who have voted them out of office.

Dead to rights

Having written all kinds of elaborated comments on Thursday's elections, I like Craig Murray's remarks better:

"For Labour, perhaps the most disastrous thing is the loss of five hundred councillors from their already shattered activist base. Added to the disappearance of their dominance in Wales and Scotland, it is the blow to the morale of their troops, already shrivelled by Iraq, that is so dangerous. Labour now consists of an extraordinary mixture of trade unionists, ageing loyal but unhappy socialists, and aggressive young neo-conservatives. Look to see the latter leaving the sinking ship for the Tories in the next year or two."

Says it all. Whatever is the point of the Labour party when there should be a 21st century party of democratic progressives. We have one right of centre, why are we stuck with a prehistoric reptile on the left of centre in the UK?

How it's to be done

When Lenin asked ‘What is to be done?’ he wasn’t expecting an answer from the Brownite faction of the Labour party. Looking about, what they have in mind seems to be:

to divide the Treasury into two.
A Ministry of the Economy and a Ministry of Finance.
A Ministry of the Economy, for those who still believe in indicative planning, that deluded conceit of Mitterand’s France, will further their chance of interfering with markets whose essential mechanisms are outside of their control, thus wrecking potential growth.

A Ministry of Finance will be essentially a tax-gatherer, for fiscal authority will be transferred to an arms' length, 'independent' appointed body, sucessfully removing discussion of tax increases, spending reductions etc. from political scrutiny.

Such independent economic institutions, like the independent Bank of England, will enjoy a permanence of policy and decision-taking that is not crudely interrupted by the intrusion of general elections and their loss.

Thus disembowelled, the Treasury will have few salient powers, and over-arching control for everything devolved, as with all other ministries, will have been transferred to the office of Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury, which title will take on a meaning it has not borne for well over a hundred years.

A Ministry of Justice, accountable at first to the Commons, but doubtless to have an independent and appointed body set up should the legislature show signs of recovery from its apparently permanent, supine position towards the executive, will end the Lord Chancellorship.

The abolition of the Privy Council will deprive the head of state of formal consultation processes outside of advice from the governing administration.

The current inter-relationship between funded think tanks (whether under beneficial taxation regimes or otherwise) providing policy advice, and government expenditures being placed with think tank funders and their nominees will continue to marginalise and extrude the Home Civil Service from its place.

The solution to the inconvenience of answering to the electorate lies in the policy of regionalism. If the structure of regional assemblies is activated for selection of assembly members by voting under proportional representation throughout the UK, and timed to coincide with a general election, then the step to electing the Westminster parliament by proportional representation will have been be made. The United Kingdom is being stripped of its constitutional safeguards and, where it suits, being made to conform to European Union norms, requirements and practices.

The gaping hole where, in Europe, there are written constitutions, penal, and civil codes, all embodying citizens’ rights and duties, defended by constitutional courts and judiciaries spear-headed by investigative magistracies with peremptory powers that would make emperors think twice, is ignored.

We do not want to be as continental Europe is; we have inherited and chosen other paths to a civilised society, in part because it has been our happiness to have never suffered statist regimes, outside of all- out war, and only then when we were wholly united in a common purpose - to defeat authoritarian statism.



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Housiness and Truthiness

Housiness is an emotion; we have all experienced it but, like all emotion, it is hard to portray. Enter your house and you feel it. If you are used to living with many others then it is particularly strongly felt when everyone is out. There is the house with the familiar light patterns, scents, furniture like a stage set, and quiet; not necessarily silence, but excluded noise. Often people sit down for a moment and savour that, then set about their inner lives. A friend (with 5 children) once remarked that she didn't want to go on holiday to exotic or fabled places; she wanted all the others to do that and she would go on holiday in her house.

It is well known that elderly people taken from their house and put into ostensibly far better care conditions fade and die. That is not the worst of cases for many simply wither and survive.

So when I look at official housing statistics on prices and numbers and accessibility for diverse age- and income groups, and analyses of low-occupation patterns, and over-crowding, and read of planning to decant populations into new and better dwellings, none of it meets the notion of housiness.

Housiness and its irrefutable claim to recognition also results in people experiencing the social exclusion of finding work in their home area but with no chance of establishing themselves in a house in an independent adult role. It seems reasonable to expect longer or shorter migrations for work, then establishing a house is resolved there, but it is hard to find work but no chance of a house.

I agree there are some problems that have no general solution and can only be left to resolve themselves but this is essentially a small-scale solution, it doesn't resolve the widespread crisis in degenerating urban and transport environments that Raedwald's statistics on gross levels of under-occupation in inner urban areas (and some outer and highly desirable areas) evidence.

All this is worsened, and its solution further distanced, by a malign state fiscal policy that results in disproportionate investment in house ownership to the detriment of all other forms of investment, notably in the production of goods and services, that favours a dysfunctional form of saving.

Brown and his incompetence and unintended economic effects is worth another post.